Unexpectedly Interesting Payphone Gives Up Its Secrets

Reverse engineering a payphone doesn’t sound like a very interesting project, at least in the United States, where payphones were little more than ruggedized versions of residential phones wi…

CapibaraZero firmware enables low-cost Flipper Zero alternatives based on ESP32-S3 hardware - CNX Software

CapibaraZero open-source firmware offers a low-cost alternative to Flipper Zero for ESP32-S3 hardware such as the LilyGO T-Embed CC1101.

OpenWrt One: A Repairable FOSS Wi-Fi 6 Router From Banana Pi

If you love open source hardware or the ones that give you full rights to do your own thing, this is one of them!

Saving A Samsung TV From The Dreaded Boot Loop

[eigma] had a difficult problem. After pulling a TV out of the trash and bringing it home, it turned out it was suffering from a troubling boot loop issue that basically made it useless. As so many…

Zero To Custom MacroPad In 37 Easy Steps

[Jeremy Weatherford] clearly has a knack for explaining projects well enough for easy reproduction but goes way further than most and has created a four-part YouTube series detailing every step fro…

MOTU Audio Interface Resurrected After Some Reverse Engineering

These days, when something electronic breaks, most folks just throw it away and get a new one. But as hackers, we prefer to find out what the actual problem is and fix it. [Bonsembiante] took that …

Hacking An IoT Camera Reveals Hard-Coded Root Password

Hacking — at least the kind where you’re breaking into stuff — is very much a learn-by-doing skill. There’s simply no substitute for getting your hands dirty and just trying…

Smartwatch Snitches On Itself And Enables Reverse Engineering

If something has a “smart” in its name, you know that it’s talking to someone else, and the topic of conversation is probably you. You may or may not like that, but that’s p…

UV-K5 All-Band Mod, Part 2: Easier Install, Better Audio, And Two Antennas

OK, it’s official: the Quansheng UV-K5 is the king of hackable ham radios — especially now that a second version of the all-band hardware and firmware mod has been released, not to ment…

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 plas…

How Apple plans to update new iPhones without opening them

Apple wants to rid the iPhone-buying process of the post-unboxing update.

Open HT Surgery Gives Cheap Transceiver All-Band Capabilities

Watch out, Baofeng; there’s a new kid on the cheap handy talkie market, and judging by this hardware and firmware upgrade to the Quansheng UV-K5, the radio’s hackability is going to kee…

Custom Library Rescues Good LoRa Hardware From Bad Firmware

The range of hardware that comes on some dev boards these days is truly staggering. Those little LoRa boards are a prime example — ESP32 with WiFi and Bluetooth, a transceiver that covers a b…

Recovering A Busted Video Capture Device With Firmware Flashing Tricks

Sometimes, you have a piece of hardware that just up and stops working on you. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to toss something broken and move on. [BuyItFixIt], as you imagine,…

Converting Bluetooth Sensors To Zigbee

With the increase in popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their need to communicate wirelessly,  there’s been a corresponding explosion of wireless protocols to chose from. Of c…