Turn Your Qualcomm Phone Or Modem Into Cellular Sniffer

If your thought repurposing DVB-T dongles for generic software defined radio (SDR) use was cool, wait until you see QCSuper, a project that re-purposes phones and modems to capture raw 2G/3G/4G/5G.…

How Wireless Charging Works And Why It’s Terrible

Wireless charging is pretty convenient, as long as the transmitter and receiver speak the same protocol. Just put the device you want to charge on the wireless charger without worrying about pluggi…

Rabbit Sighted In The Wild

Here at Hackaday we’re suckers for old abandoned technologies, the more obscure the better. The history of the telephone has plenty to capture our attention, and it’s from that arena th…

A Dial Phone SIPs Asterisk

An endless source of amusement for those of advancing years can come from handing a rotary phone to a teenager and asking them to dial a number with it. It’s rare for them to be stumped by a …

IPhone 6S NVMe Chip Tapped Using A Flexible PCB

Psst! Hey kid! Want to reverse-engineer some iPhones? Well, did you know that modern iPhones use PCIe, and specifically, NVMe for their storage chips? And if so, have you ever wondered about sniffi…

The End Of Landlines?

Imagine if, somehow, telephones of all kinds had not been invented. Then, this morning, someone entered a big corporation board room and said, “We’d like to string copper wire to every …

Your 1983 Video Phone Is Finally Ready

If you read Byte magazine in 1983, you might have expected that, by now, you’d be able to buy the red phone with the video screen built-in. You know, like the one that appears on the cover of…

Schematics, For A Modern Flagship Phone

The mobile phone is an expensive and often surprisingly fragile device, whose manufacturers are notorious for making them as difficult to repair as possible. Glued-together cases and unreplaceable …

A Crossbar Telephone Switch Explained

There’s an old adage about waiting hours for a bus only for two to appear at once, and for Hackaday this month we’re pleased to have seen this in a run of analogue telephone projects. L…

A Complete Exchange From Scratch For Your Rotary Dial Phones

Such has been the success of the mobile phone that in many places they have removed the need for wired connections, for example where this is being written the old copper connection can only be mad…

POTS At A Hacker Camp

For those of us off the Atlantic coast of Europe it’s a frigid winter as our isles are lashed by continuous storms. Summer seems a very long time ago, and the fun of the EMF 2022 hacker camp …

Remembering ISDN

We are definitely spoiled these days in terms of Internet access. In much of the world gigabit speeds are common and even cheap plans are likely to be measured in 100s of megabits. But there was a …

37C3: When Apple Ditches Thuderbolt, Hack USB-C

[Thomas Roth], aka [Ghidraninja], and author of the [Stacksmashing] YouTube channel, investigated Apple’s Lightning port and created a cool debugging tool that allowed one to get JTAG on the …

Mailblocks Makes Your Phone Work More Like The Post, Kinda?

Phones can be distracting, with notifications popping up all the time to snare our attention and maybe even ruin our lives. [Guy Dupont] wishes to be no slave to the machine, and thus built a solut…

What Can You Do With Thousands Of Vintage Telephones?

Telephones. We’ve got a few around the place, and some may remember all the weird and wonderful varieties produced over the years. But, vintage phone dealers [Ron and Mary Knappen] may have a…

A Buzzing, Flashing Phone Ringer For The Elderly

For a lonely person, elderly or otherwise, the sound of a ringing phone can be music to the ears, unless of course it’s another spam call. But what good is a phone when you can’t hear i…

Grannophone Helps You Stay In Touch

Whether it’s distance, pandemics, or both that separate you from your elderly loved ones, what’s the best idea for communicating with them so they don’t suffer from loneliness on …

Portable 1990s POS Will Strain Your Back

[JR] over at [Tech Throwback] got ahold of an unusual piece of gear recently — a portable Point of Sale (POS) credit card machine from the late 1990s (video, embedded below the break ). Today…

Open-Source Cell Phone Based On ESP32

Over the past decade or so, smartphones have exploded in popularity and seamlessly integrated themselves into nearly every aspect of most people’s lives. Although that comes with a few downsi…

Windows 10 The Hard Way: On A Phone

Sure, there are — or were — Windows phones. But [neozed] wanted something different. An earlier project ran Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 4 with some tricks, but those are sometimes ha…