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3 Articles

DEFCON Shenanigans: Hack The Hackaday Hat

August 1, 2014 by 17 Comments

We don’t want to call it a challenge because we fear the regulars at DEFCON can turn our piece of hardware into a smoking pile of slag, but we are planning to bring a bit of fun along with us. I’ll be wearing this classy headgear and I invite you to hack your way into the WiFi enabled Hackaday Hat.

I’ll be wearing the hat-of-many-scrolling-colors around all weekend for DEFCON 22, August 7-10th in Las Vegas. You may also find [Brian Benchoff] sporting the accessory at times. Either way, come up and say hello. We want to see any hardware you have to show us, and we’ll shower you with a bit of swag.

Don’t let it end there. Whip out your favorite pen-testing distro and hack into the hat’s access point. From there the router will serve up more information on how to hack into one of the shell accounts. Own an account and you can leave your alias for the scoreboard as well as push your own custom message to the hat’s 32×7 RGB LED marquee.

You can learn a bit more about the hat’s hardware on this project page. But as usual I’ve built this with a tight deadline and am still trying to populate all the details of the project.

Self-waking Computer For DIY Cloud Storage

February 21, 2013 by 39 Comments

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[Dominic] decided to take control of his cloud storage by switching to OwnCloud. Unlike most cloud storage solutions, this isn’t a company offering you free space. It’s an open source software package which your run on your own machine. [Dom] didn’t want to leave his box running 24/7 as it would be unused the majority of the time. So he hacked this router to switch on the computer whenever he tries to access the storage.

Obviously this is a Wake-On-Lan type of situation, but the hardware he has chosen to use doesn’t include those features. Since he already had this TP-Link 703n on hand he decided to use it as a controller for the computer. His method is quite clever. The router is running a script that monitors the computer and the bandwidth it’s using. When traffic from the network stops, the router will issue a shutdown command within just a few minutes. It then assigns itself the computer’s IP address so that it can listen for incoming requests and use the relay on that breadboard to turn the box back on. Obviously running the embedded system is much more efficient than having an entire computer turned on all the time, and it’s WiFi capabilities mean no cords to run to the home network.

Turning A Tiny Router Into A Webradio

January 8, 2013 by 17 Comments

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While the hacking zeitgeist is focused nearly entirely on all those new ARM dev boards that include the Raspberry Pi, some people out there are still doing it old school by modifying existing electronics to suit their needs. [Peter] picked up one of those very inexpensive TP-Link 703n wireless routers we’ve seen before and modified it into a standalone web radio, complete with volume and tuner knobs.

The TP-Link 703n is a wireless router smaller than a credit card available from the usual Chinese resellers for about $20. Able to run OpenWRT, this very inexpensive piece of hardware can be transformed into a device comparable to the Raspberry Pi; a complete Linux system with a few GPIO pins.

[Peter] took his 703n router and added an ATtiny85 connected to two pots and the internal UART. This, along with a script to read the values from the pots, tells the router what station to tune into and what volume to play it. The audio is handled by a USB soundcard with an internal speaker, making [Peter]’s build one of the smallest purpose-built Internet radios we’ve seen.

You can see [Peter]’s radio in action after the break.

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