Learning About The Flume Water Monitor

The itch to investigate lurks within all us hackers. Sometimes, you just have to pull something apart to learn how it works. [Stephen Crosby] found himself doing just that when he got his hands on …

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…

PlayStation Motherboard Sanded And Scanned, But There’s More To Do

If you want to reverse engineer the boards in a modern console, you’d better have a lab, a lot of fancy gear, and a good few months to dedicate to the task. The humble PlayStation, on the oth…

Apollo-era PCB Reverse Engineering To KiCad

Earlier this year [Skyhawkson] got ahold of a Apollo-era printed circuit board which he believes was used in a NASA test stand. He took high quality photos of both sides of the board and superimpos…

Supercon 2024 SAO Petal KiCad Redrawing Project

Last week I completed the SAO flower badge redrawing task, making a complete KiCad project. Most of the SAO petals are already released as KiCad projects, except for the Petal Matrix. The design fe…

Bypassing Airpods Hearing Aid Georestriction With A Faraday Cage

When Apple recently announced the hearing aid feature on their new AirPods Pro 2, it got the attention of quite a few people. Among these were [Rithwik Jayasimha] and friends, with [Rithwik] gettin…

Bluetooth Dongle Gives Up Its Secrets With Quick Snooping Hack

There’s a lot going on in our wireless world, and the number of packets whizzing back and forth between our devices is staggering. All this information can be a rich vein to mine for IoT hack…

Fail Of The Week: Subscription EV Charger Becomes Standalone, Briefly

At this point in the tech dystopia cycle, it’s no surprise that the initial purchase price of a piece of technology is likely not the last payment you’ll make. Almost everything these d…

Supercon 2024 Flower SAO Badge Redrawing In KiCad

Out of curiosity, I redrew the Supercon Vectorscope badge schematics in KiCad last year. As you might suspect, going from PCB to schematic is opposite to the normal design flow of KiCad and most ot…

Tearing Down Nintendo’s Alarmo Alarm Clock

Most of us will probably have seen Nintendo’s latest gadget pop up recently. Rather than a Switch 2 announcement, we got greeted with a Nintendo-branded alarm clock. Featuring a 2.8″ co…

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 …

Have You Heard Of The Liquid Powder Display?

Over the decades the technology behind flat panel displays has continuously evolved, and we’ve seen many of them come and go. Among the popular ones there are a few that never quite made the …

ROG Ally Community Rebuilds The Proprietary Asus EGPU

As far as impressive hacks go, this one is more than enough for your daily quota. You might remember the ROG Ally, a Steam Deck-like x86 gaming console that’s graced our pages a couple lf tim…

IPhone 15 Gets Dual SIM Through FPC Patch

It can often feel like modern devices are less hackable than their thicker and far less integrated predecessors, but perhaps it’s just that our techniques need to catch up. Here’s an ou…

Man-in-the-Middle PCB Unlocks HP Ink Cartridges

It’s a well-known secret that inkjet ink is being kept at artificially high prices, which is why many opt to forego ‘genuine’ manufacturer cartridges and get third-party ones inst…

Laser Fault Injection, Now With Optional Decapping

Whether the goal is reverse engineering, black hat exploitation, or just simple curiosity, getting inside the packages that protect integrated circuits has long been the Holy Grail of hacking. It i…

Reverse Engineering A Keyboard Driver Uncovers A Self-Destruct Code

Should you be able to brick a keyboard just by writing a driver to flash the lights on it? We don’t think so either. [TheNotary] got quite the shock when embarking on a seemingly straightforw…

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Electronic Arts Interlock

Continuing the series on floppy copy protection, [GloriousCow] examines Electronic Arts’ Interlock system. This was used from 1984 to 1987 for at least fourteen titles released on both 5.25&#…

Train Speed Signaling Adapted For Car

One major flaw of designing societies around cars is the sheer amount of signage that drivers are expected to recognize, read, and react to. It’s a highly complex system that requires constan…

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok

Many have sought the holy grail of making commercial media both readable and copy-proof, especially once everyone began to copy those floppies. One of these attempts to make floppies copy-proof was…