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RTL-SDR: Seven Years Later
Before swearing my fealty to the Jolly Wrencher, I wrote for several other sites, creating more or less the same sort of content I do now. In fact, the topical overlap was enough that occasionally...
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The Amazon Dash Button: A Retrospective
The Internet of Things will revolutionize everything! Manufacturing? Dog walking? Coffee bean refilling? Car driving? Food eating? Put a sensor in it! The marketing makes it pretty clear that there’s...
View ArticleHackaday Links: September 8, 2019
We start this week with very sad news indeed. You may have heard about the horrific fire on the dive boat Conception off Santa Cruz Island last week, which claimed 33 lives. Sadly, we lost one of our...
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Dealing with Missing Pin Allocations
Blindsided by missing pin allocations? Perhaps you’re working on a piece of hardware and you notice that the documentation is entirely wrong. How can you get your device to work? [Dani Eichhorn]’s...
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Reverse Engineering Liberates Dash Cam Video
If you’ve purchased a piece of consumer electronics in the last few years, there’s an excellent chance that you were forced to use some proprietary application (likely on a mobile device) to unlock its...
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Reverse-Engineering Xiaomi IoT Firmware
IoT devices rarely ever just do what they’re advertised. They’ll almost always take up more space than they need to – on top of that, their processor and memory alone should be enough to run a...
View ArticleReverse Engineering A Two-Wire Intercom
There was a time when an intercom was simply a pair of boxes with speakers joined by a couple of wires, with an audio amplifier somewhere in the mix. But intercoms have like everything else joined the...
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Why Buy Toys When You Can Build Them Instead?
Like many creative individuals who suddenly find themselves parents, [Marta] wanted to make something special for his children to play with. Anybody can just purchase an off-the-shelf electronic toy,...
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Swapping the ROMs in Mini Arcade Cabinets
You’ve probably seen a few of these miniature arcade games online or in big box retailers: for $20 USD or so you get scaled-down version of a classic arcade cabinet, perfect for a desk toy or to throw...
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Rescue An Expensive Servo With Some Reverse Engineering
[Andrew] had a servo damaged by someone connecting the power supply to the wrong pins (whoops) which fried the microcontroller and a logic level shifter. With a bit of reverse engineering, he...
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Reverse Engineering An Old Bus Display
When his makerspace was gifted a pair of Luminator LED signs of the sort you might see on the front of a bus, [PWalsh] decided to pull one apart to see what made it tick. Along the way, he managed to...
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Software Defined Radio Gets Physical Control
Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a great technology, but there’s something so satisfying about spinning a physical knob to cruise the airwaves. Wanting to restore that tactile experience, [Tysonpower]...
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VGA Signal in a Browser Window, Thanks to Reverse Engineering
Epiphan VGA2USB LR VGA-to-USB devices [Ben Cox] found some interesting USB devices on eBay. The Epiphan VGA2USB LR accepts VGA video on one end and presents it as a USB webcam-like video signal on the...
View ArticleReverse Engineer PCBs with SprintLayout
[Bwack] had some scanned pictures of an old Commodore card and wanted to recreate PC boards from it. It’s true that he could have just manually redrawn everything in a CAD package, but that’s tedious....
View ArticleReverse Engineering Yokis Home Automation Devices
These days, it’s hard to keep track of all the companies that are trying to break into the home automation market. Whether they’re rebrands of somebody else’s product or completely new creations, it...
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New Part Day: LED Driver is FPGA Dev Board in Disguise
Our new part of the day is the ColorLight 5A-75B, a board that’s meant to drive eight of those ubiquitous high-density color LED panels over gigabit Ethernet. If you were building a commercial LED...
View ArticleThe Multiyear Hunt for a Gameboy Game’s Bug
[Enddrift] had a real problem trying to run a classic game, Hello Kitty Collection: Miracle Fashion Maker, into a GBA (Gameboy Advance) emulator. During startup, the game would hit an endless loop...
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Xbox Controller Provides Intro to SWD Hacking
It’s amazing to see how much technology is packed into even the “simple” devices that we take for granted in modern life. Case in point, the third party Xbox controller that [wrongbaud] recently...
View ArticleA NES Motherboard For The Open Source Generation
As the original hardware from the golden era of 8-bit computer gaming becomes a bit long in the tooth, keeping it alive has become something of a concern for enthusiasts. There have been a succession...
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Subwoofer Gets Arduino Brain Transplant
The Samsung PS-WTX500 subwoofer is designed to be used as part of a 5.1 channel home theater system, but not just any system. It contains the amplifiers for all the channels, but they’ll only function...
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