Wireless Portable USB Tether

May 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

USB

[Pete] has put together a fairly simple writeup on building a wireless USB tether for your DSLR. He’s basically using a pair of USB wireless adapters and a battery pack. In his original version, he did some slight modification to the dock that powers the USB dongle, adding his own battery pack too. He notes that this whole project can be done without the effort he put into it, at a little more expense. The only improvement we think would be nice would be a better way to package it to keep it out of the way while you shoot.

Install Windows 7 On Your Netbook

May 16, 2009 by Eliot 47 Comments

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No one will ever accuse us of being Windows fanboys; we’re certainly fans of netbooks though (or anything cheap enough that we don’t care if we accidentally burn a hole through it). We’ve heard from quite a few friends that Windows 7 is actually an excellent operating system to run on a netbook and is a dream compared to XP. Gizmodo has compiled a guide to getting the release candidate on your lightweight machine. It’s available now and will work for free for a year. The image is 2.36GB which you need to dd onto a USB device. They recommend at least an 8GB drive, but anything smaller than 16GB and you’ll have to use Window’s compact utility to save space. Other than these space considerations, the install appears to be easy. Let us know about your experiences using Windows 7 on your netbook.

Augmented Network Interfaces

April 25, 2009 by Eliot 35 Comments

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Here’s an interesting bit of research to come out of Microsoft and UCSD. The Somniloquy project is a new type of network interface. It’s a USB device that allows a computer to continue network communications after being put to sleep. By offloading these tasks, machines that would normally stay awake for RDP and file transfers are only powered up when absolutely necessary. The device uses a Gumstix board like the one used in the Tor hardware adapter. The device pictured above has two USB interfaces, but the second is just for debugging and not needed for proper operation. The board runs BSD and creates a USBNet bridge to the Vista host. When the host daemon detects the computer going to sleep, it hands off active communication to the gumstix. They developed “stub” applications to handle the various types of communication. For downloads, they used wget to download only the portion of the data that was still left. For bittorrent, they customized the command line client ctorrent to manage the download. Both programs wake up the PC upon completion and transfer the file off of the SD card.

[via Engadget]

AXiS-49 Teardown

March 31, 2009 by Eliot 5 Comments

cthruteardown

We touched on harmonic table MIDI controllers when [aris] was building one. [Ken Rushton] has one of C-Thru’s commercial keypads, the AXiS-49, and disassembled the device to show how it works. A PIC18F2450 microcontroller provides the USB interface and is connected to a dsPIC33FJ128GP310 digital signal controller which decodes the keypresses. The membrane buttons are made with two concentric graphite disks that touch gold contacts. The microcontroller measures the time between the two points contacting to determine the button velocity. monome button clones also use circular contact pads, but cannot calculate velocity because they only have one element.

[via Matrixsynth]

Through-hole Bus Pirate Kit From Fundamental Logic

March 31, 2009 by Ian 24 Comments

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Fundamental Logic is selling a Bus Pirate kit and bare PCB based on our universal serial interface tool. They started with our serial port-based v1a hardware, and modified it to use all through-hole parts. 8pin DIP LP2951ACN/-3.3 switchable voltage regulators replace the surface mount TPS79650/33 that we used. The PIC is pre-programmed with our latest firmware, version 0f, which includes a bootloader for easy firmware updates through the serial port. Documentation includes illustrated assembly instructions.

Speaking of Bus Pirate goodness, we’re busy working on hardware V2. As astute readers may have already noticed, the final version of the Bus Pirate incorporates an FTDI USB->serial chip, and draws its power from the USB port. We also tackled the software-controlled pull-up resistor feature, and reduced the overall part count and cost. Best of all, we’re working to make assembled PCBs available with world-wide shipping. The how-to should be ready in a few weeks.

Sniffing Keystrokes Via Laser, Power Lines

March 20, 2009 by Eliot 26 Comments

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Researchers from Inverse Path showed a couple interesting techniques for sniffing keystrokes at CanSecWest. For their first experiments they used a laser pointed at the shiny back of a laptop. The keystrokes would cause the laptop to vibrate which they could detect just like they would with any laser listening device. They’ve done it successfully from anywhere between 50 to 100 feet away. They used techniques similar to those in speech recognition to determine what sentences were being typed.

In a different attack, they sniffed characters from a PS/2 keyboard by monitoring the ground line in an outlet 50 feet away. They haven’t yet been able to collect more than just single strokes, but expect to get full words and sentences soon. This leakage via power line is discussed in the 1972 Tempest document we posted about earlier. The team said it wasn’t possible with USB or laptop keyboards.

[Thanks Jeramy]

USB Sniffing In Linux

March 19, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

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[Robert] sent in this tutorial on how to set up USB sniffing in linux. Useful for seeing exactly what is being communicated to and from your USB devices, this ability is built into linux. [Bert], the author, shows us the steps involved and how to filter it to get the data we desire. You can specify exactly which device to capture data from. His example, shown above, is a session with an Arduino.