Atari Xbox 360 Controller

January 9, 2009 by Eliot 6 Comments

3600

It’s amazing what [Ben Heckendorn] can manage to crank out in just five hours. This time it’s a wireless Xbox 360 controller stuffed inside an Atari 2600 controller. The guts are from a Guitar Hero 3 controller. It’s a fairly compact board and [Ben] used thin ATA wire for the connections. While it doesn’t have all the buttons of a true Xbox controller, this 3600 controller has enough to make it useful in arcade games. The joystick portion was reused without any modification. Things like the guide button and ring of light are located underneath.

New WPA TKIP Attack

November 9, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

wifibox

[Martin Beck] and [Erik Tews] have just released a paper covering an improved attack against WEP and a brand new attack against WPA(PDF). For the WEP half, they offer a nice overview of attacks up to this point and the optimizations they made to reduce the number of packets needed to approximately 25K. The only serious threat to WPA so far has been the coWPAtty dictionary attack. This new attack lets you decrypt the last 12 bytes of a WPA packet’s plaintext and then generate arbitrary packets to send to the client. While it doesn’t recover the WPA key, the attacker is still able to send packets directly to the machine they’re attacking and could potentially read back the response via an outbound connection to the internet.

[photo: niallkennedy]

[via SANS]

Arduino RC Airplane

November 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

arduino_airplane

[Olivier] told us about this fantastic project where he built his own RC airplane. The airplane itself is nothing special, it is the controls that are worth paying attention to. He used an Arduino Diecemilla , some XBee transceivers, and a SparkFun Wee. The main site is a general overview, but there are links to more detailed breakdowns of how to build some of the parts. There are several videos of him flying it as well.

Wireless Arduino Programming With ZigBee

November 2, 2008 by Eliot 18 Comments

ZigBee is a low-power communication system using digital radios. It’s intended to be easier to work with than Bluetooth. Adafruit recently added an adapter board for Digi’s XBee product line and has put together a great how-to to show the devices potential. Using two XBee radios and adapters you can wirelessly program an Arduino board. This would be great if your Arduino was installed in an inaccessible area or maybe it’s over 100feet away from where you’re working. The radios do serial communication just fine. What the how-to covers is getting the reset line working so the Arduino can restart automatically after you program it. Once the radio pair is configured properly, it will pass the RTS line state directly from one device to the other.

Eavesdrop On Keyboards Wirelessly

October 20, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 71 Comments

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/2007855%5D

Every time you press a key on your keyboard, a small burst of electromagnetic radiation is let out. This radiation can be captured and decoded. Though it only affects some models, this is pretty serious. They tested 11 different keyboards and they were all vulnerable to at least one of the four methods of attack. Tests have shown that the data can be read through walls and up to 65 feet away. That is pretty scary stuff. Someone could be setting up in the apartment or office right next to yours to listen to every keystroke you type. Check out the second video after the break.

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Wireless Accelerometer Controlled RGB LED

October 9, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[Andlier] sent us this cool little project. He has built a wireless accelerometer controlled RGB LED lighting system. Based on what a mouth full that is, it sounds complicated right? The end result looks fairly intuitive. Simply pick up the controller and tilt your hand to change the color of the light.

The controller consists of an Atmel AVR168 microcontroller. He doesn’t specify what transceiver he is using, but if you look in the comments, he notes that he added an antenna to it to extend the range. The part that controls the LED is based off of an Atmel AVR169 microcontroller hooked to some shiftbright LED modules.

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Xbox 360 Battery Pack Teardown

October 4, 2008 by Eliot 26 Comments

Reader, [Fox9p3400], opened up an Xbox 360 controller battery pack so we could all see what goes into one. It contains two Sanyo 2100mAh NiMH AA rechargeables (Model HR-3U 1.2V). In addition to that, there is an Atmel microcontroller (not pictured) and the copper temperature probe you can see above. He has more pictures on Photobucket.