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 …

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 t…

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 practica…

Unraveling The Secrets Of Apple’s Mysterious Fisheye Format

Apple has developed a proprietary — even mysterious — “fisheye” projection format used for their immersive videos, such as those played back by the Apple Vision Pro. What&#8…

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…

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, l…

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 an…

Porting Modern Windows Applications To Windows 95

Windows 95 was an amazing operating system that would forever transform the world of home computing, setting the standard for user interaction on a desktop and quite possibly was the OS which had t…

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 light…

How Star Trek Breached The Defences Of A Major Broadcaster

Back in 2000 in the brief lull between COVID lockdowns in the UK, I found myself abruptly on the move, with a very short time indeed to move my possessions into storage. As I was going through the …

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 …

The Intel 8088 And 8086 Processor’s Instruction Prefetch Circuitry

Cache prefetching is what allows processors to have data and/or instructions ready for use in a fast local cache rather than having to wait for a fetch request to trickle through to system RAM and …

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.…

Pairing A New Remote To A Cheap RC Car

The cheap little RC cars are abundant anywhere you are, and if you’ve ever disassembled one, you are familiar with how the PCB looks. A single-sided phenolic paper PCB with a mystery chip dri…

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 …

Gaming On A TP-Link TL-WDR4900 Wireless Router

When you look at your home router, the first thought that comes to mind probably isn’t about playing games on it. But that doesn’t stop [Manwyrm] and [tSYS] from taking on the task of t…

Hacking An Actual WiFi Toothbrush With An ESP32-C3

Following on the heels of a fortunately not real DDoS botnet composed of electric toothbrushes, [Aaron Christophel] got his hands on a sort-of-electric toothbrush which could totally be exploited f…

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…

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Turned USB Device Through Relentless Digging

In what’s perhaps one of the most impressive laptop reverse engineering posts in recent memory, [Andrey Konovalov] brings us an incredibly detailed story of how he’s discovered and succ…

Restoring Starlink’s Missing Ethernet Ports

Internet connectivity in remote areas can be a challenge, but recently SpaceX’s Starlink has emerged as a viable solution for many spots on the globe — including the Ukrainian frontline…