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Bus Pirate 5 Now Shipping
It’s happened to all of us at one time or another. There’s some component sitting on the bench, say an I2C sensor, a new display, or maybe a flash chip, and you want to poke around with it. So you get...
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Reviving a Sensorless X-Ray Cabinet with Analog Film
In the same way that a doctor often needs to take a non-destructive look inside a patient to diagnose a problem, those who seek to reverse engineer electronic systems can greatly benefit from the power...
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Hands On: Bus Pirate 5
If you’ve been involved with electronics and hardware hacking for awhile, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard of the Bus Pirate. First introduced on the pages of Hackaday back in 2008 by creator...
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Mapping the Nintendo Switch PCB
As electronics have advanced, they’ve not only gotten more powerful but smaller as well. This size is great for portability and speed but can make things like repair more inaccessible to those of us...
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Extracting SecOC Keys From a 2021 Toyota RAV4 Prime
With the recently introduced SecOC (Secure Onboard Communication) standard, car manufacturers seek to make the CAN bus networks that form the backbone of modern day cars more secure. This standard adds...
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Generator Control Panel Unlocked with Reverse Engineering Heroics
Scoring an interesting bit of old gear on the second-hand market is always a bit of a thrill — right up to the point where you realize the previous owner set some kind of security code on it. Then it...
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Hackaday Links: March 31, 2024
Battlelines are being drawn in Canada over the lowly Flipper Zero, a device seen by some as an existential threat to motor vehicle owners across the Great White North. The story started a month or so...
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Adjustable Lights Help Peer Inside Chips with IR
If you’re used to working through a microscope, you’ve probably noticed that the angle of the light greatly affects how your workpiece looks. Most of us prefer the relatively flat lighting provided by...
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Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring
Last time, we looked into using a logic analyzer to decode SPI signals of LCD displays, which can help us reuse LCD screens from proprietary systems, or port LCD driver code from one platform to...
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Human-Interfacing Devices: HID over I2C
In the previous two HID articles, we talked about stealing HID descriptors, learned about a number of cool tools you can use for HID hacking on Linux, and created a touchscreen device. This time, let’s...
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Hacked Oscilloscope Plays Breakout, Hints at More
You know things are getting real when the Dremel is one of the first tools you turn to after unboxing your new oscilloscope. But when your goal is to hack the scope to play Breakout, sometimes plastic...
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Ancient Cable Modem Reveals Its RF Secrets
Most reverse engineering projects we see around here have some sort of practical endpoint in mind. Usually, but not always. Reverse-engineering a 40-year-old cable modem probably serves no practical...
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Reverse Engineering the Quansheng Hardware
In the world of cheap amateur radio transceivers, the Quansheng UV-K5 can’t be beaten for hackability. But pretty much every hack we’ve seen so far focuses on the firmware. What about the hardware? To...
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Reverse Engineering A Fancy Disposable Vape
Many readers will be aware of the trend for disposable vapes, and how harvesting them for lithium-ion batteries has become a popular pastime in our community. We’re all used to the slim ones about the...
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Supercon 2023: Jose Angel Torres On Building A Junkyard Secure Phone
If you ever wondered just what it takes to build a modern device like a phone, you should have come to last year’s Supercon and talked with [Jose Angel Torres]. He’s an engineer whose passion into...
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The Long Road Towards Reverse Engineering The ESP32 Wi-Fi Driver
Although much of the software that runs on the ESP32 microcontroller is open source, the Wi-Fi driver is not. Instead, it uses a proprietary binary blob. This was no problem for [Jasper Devreker]’s...
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Old Dot-Matrix Displays Give Up Their Serial Secrets
If there’s one thing we like better around here than old, obscure displays, it’s old, obscure displays with no documentation that need a healthy dose of reverse engineering before they can be put to...
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Reverse Engineering Keeps Early Ford EVs Rolling
With all the EV hype in the air, you’d be forgiven for thinking electric vehicles are something new. But of course, EVs go way, way back, to the early 19th century by some reckonings. More recently but...
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Supercon 2023: Reverse Engineering Commercial Coffee Machines
There was a time when a coffee vending machine was a relatively straightforward affair, with a basic microcontroller doing not much more than the mechanical sequencer it replaced. A modern machine by...
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Hosting Your Own PixMob Party Made Easy
Over the last few years, it’s been increasingly common for concertgoers to be handed a light-up bracelet from PixMob that synchronizes with the others in the crowd to turn the entire audience into a...
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