Wireless Hacks

1106 Articles

Reprogramming Cheap WiFi Outlets

April 16, 2018 by 52 Comments

If you want to retrofit your home with smart outlets and lightbulbs, bust out your wallet. You can easily spend forty dollars for a smart light bulb at your local home supply store, and strips of smart sockets could cost sixty. When [coogle] found a WiFi-enabled four-outlet power strip on Amazon, he couldn’t resist. Sure, the no-name strip would be locked down behind a stupid iPhone interface and will probably turn your house into a botnet, but never mind that: you can easily reprogram these power strips to be whatever you want.

After receiving these power strips and tearing them open, [coogle] found exactly what you would expect from a no-name white goods manufacturer. There’s a board with an Espressif chip and a WiFi antenna, and a second board with a few relays, with a few wires connecting the two. You only need to browse AliExpress for a few minutes to figure out what’s going on here. The brains of the outfit are in the ESP8266, and if you can control that, you have your own Internet of Power Strips.

The problem, then, was reprogramming the ESP8266. This was a version of the chip [coogle] hadn’t seen before, but a quick query with the Google Mother Brain revealed it was a WT8266-S1 module, with all the pins required for programming easily accessible on a convenient header. After connecting this header up to an ESP programming board, [coogle] had all the relevant information including the capacity of the Flash. There’s still a bit more work to make this a functional WiFi power outlet, namely figuring out which GPIOs and wires connect to which relays, but this is effectively a completely Open IoT device right now. All you have to do is bring your own firmware.

Mc Lighting Takes The Pain Out Of Blinking

April 14, 2018 by 1 Comment

If you want to blink a ton of WS2812-alike LED pixels over WiFi, the hardware side of things is easy enough: an LED strip, and ESP8266 unit, and a beefy enough power supply to feed them. But the software side — that’s where it can be a bit of a pain.

Enter Mc Lighting. It makes the software side of things idiot-proof. Flash the firmware onto the ESP8266, and you’ve got your choice of REST, WebSockets, or MQTT to get the data in. This means that it’ll work with Homekit, NodeRed, or an ESP-hosted web interface that you can pull up from any smartphone.

The web interface is particularly swell, and has a bunch of animations built in. (Check out the video below.) This means that you can solder some wires, flash an ESP, and your least computer-savvy relatives can be controlling the system in no time. And speaking of videos, Mc Lighting’s author [Tobias] has compiled a playlist of projects that use the library, also just below. The docs on GitHub are great, and also check out the wiki.

So what are you waiting for? Do you or your loved ones need some blink in your life? And while you’re ordering LED strips, get two. You’re going to want to build TWANG! as well.

Continue reading “Mc Lighting Takes The Pain Out Of Blinking” →

Monitor Foot Traffic Using Radio

April 6, 2018 by 15 Comments

We talk a lot about information security around here, but in reality it’s not at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Most people are content to walk around with their phones constantly looking for WiFi or Bluetooth connections despite the dangers. But if you’re not a black hat sort of person, you can do something like [Verkehrsrot] did and use all of these phones to do something useful and harmless.

[Verkehrsrot]’s project involves building a radio listening device in order to get an estimate of the amount of traffic in a particular area. The device polls for and detects WiFi and Bluetooth devices nearby and tallies them. For the privacy-minded, it doesn’t persistently store any information about the people or the devices that it detects. The project also runs on a variety of platforms, although you can get the whole thing up and running with little more than an ESP32 and a small lithium-ion battery.

If you’re looking for a useful way to tally the number of people in a given area, this project could be the thing for you. Not everyone keeps their WiFi and Bluetooth turned on, but even so this is still a good way to estimate. But if you need to count everyone going into a room, for example, you’ll need another way to count them.

Build Your Own Antenna For Outdoor Monitoring With LoRa

March 31, 2018 by 15 Comments

LoRa and LPWANs (Low Power Wide Area Networks) are all the range (tee-hee!) in wireless these days. LoRa is a sub 1-GHz wireless technology using sophisticated signal processing and modulation techniques to achieve long-range communications.

With that simplified introduction, [Omkar Joglekar] designed his own LoRa node used for outdoor sensor monitoring based on the HopeRF RFM95 LoRa module. It’s housed in an IP68 weatherproof enclosure and features an antenna that was built from scratch using repurposed copper rods. He wrote up the complete build, materials, and description which makes it possible for others to try their hand at putting together their own complete LoRa node for outdoor monitoring applications.

Once it’s built, you can use this simple method to range test your nodes and if you get really good, you might be setting distance records like this.

Speaking The Same Language As A Wireless Thermometer

March 18, 2018 by 7 Comments

Temperature is a delicate thing. Our bodies have acclimated to a tight comfort band, so it is no wonder that we want to measure and control it accurately. Plus, heating and cooling are expensive. Measuring a single point in a dwelling may not be enough, especially if there are multiple controlled environments like a terrarium, pet enclosure, food storage, or just the garage in case the car needs to warm up. [Tim Leland] wanted to monitor commercially available sensors in several rooms of his house to track and send alerts.

The sensors of choice in this project are weather resistant and linked in his project page. Instead of connecting them to a black box, they are linked to a Raspberry Pi so your elaborate home automation schemes can commence. [Tim] learned how to speak the thermometer’s language from [Ray] who posted about it a few years ago.

The system worked well, but range from the receiver was only 10 feet. Thanks to some suggestions from his comments section, [Tim] switched the original 433MHz receiver for a superheterodyne version. Now the sensors can be a hundred feet from the hub. The upgraded receiver is also linked on his page.

We’ve delved into thermocouple reading recently, and we’ve featured [Tim Leland] and his 433MHz radios before.

Wireless Protocol Reverse Engineered To Create Wrist Wearable Mouse

March 10, 2018 by 7 Comments

We’ve seen a few near-future sci-fi films recently where computers respond not just to touchscreen gestures but also to broad commands, like swiping a phone to throw its display onto a large flat panel display. It’s a nice metaphor, and if we’re going to see something like it soon, perhaps this wrist-mounted pointing device will be one way to get there.

The video below shows the finished product in action, with the cursor controlled by arm movements. Finger gestures that are very much like handling a real mouse’s buttons are interpreted as clicks. The wearable has a Nano, an MPU6050 IMU, and a nRF24L01 transceiver, all powered by some coin cells and tucked nicely into a 3D-printed case. To be honest, as cool as [Ronan Gaillard]’s wrist mouse is, the real story here is the reverse engineering he and his classmate did to pull this one off.

The road to the finished product was very interesting and more detail is shared in their final presentation (in French and heavy with memes). Our French is sufficient only to decipher “Le dongle Logitech,” but there are enough packet diagrams supporting into get the gist. They sniffed the packets going between a wireless keyboard and its dongle and figured out how to imitate mouse movements using an NRF24 module. Translating wrist and finger movements to cursor position via the 6-axis IMU involved some fairly fancy math, but it all seems to have worked in the end, and it makes for a very impressive project.

Is sniffing wireless packets in your future? Perhaps this guide to Wireshark and the nRF24L01 will prove useful.

Continue reading “Wireless Protocol Reverse Engineered To Create Wrist Wearable Mouse” →

High-Effort Streaming Remote For Low-Effort Bingeing

March 10, 2018 by 7 Comments

There’s no limit to the amount of work some people will put into avoiding work. For instance, why bother to get up from your YouTube-induced vegetative state to adjust the volume when you can design and build a remote to do it for you?

Loath to interrupt his PC streaming binge sessions, [miroslavus] decided to take matters into his own hands. When a commercially available wireless keyboard proved simultaneously overkill for the job and comically non-ergonomic, he decided to build a custom streaming remote. His recent microswitch encoder is prominently featured and provides scrolling control for volume and menu functions, and dedicated buttons are provided for play controls. The device reconfigures at the click of a switch to support Netflix, which like YouTube is controlled by sending keystrokes to the PC through a matching receiver. It’s a really thoughtful design, and we’re sure the effort [miroslavus] put into this will be well worth the dozens of calories it’ll save in the coming years.

A 3D-printed DIY remote is neat, but don’t forget that printing can also save a dog-chewed remote and win the Repairs You Can Print contest.

Continue reading “High-Effort Streaming Remote For Low-Effort Bingeing” →