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…

$3 Smartwatch Can Run Python

[Poking Technology] doesn’t think much of his new smartwatch. It is, by his admission, the cheapest possible smartwatch, coming in at about $3. It has very few useful features but he has figu…

Recovering An Agilent 2000a/3000a Oscilloscope With Corrupt Firmware NAND Flash

Everyone knows that you can never purchase enough projects off EBay, lest boredom might inadvertently strike. That’s why [Anthony Kouttron] got his mitts on an Agilent DSO-X 2014A digital osc…

New Part Day: A Hackable Smart Ring

We’ve seen prolific firmware hacker [Aaron Christophel] tackle smart devices of all sorts, and he never fails to deliver. This time, he’s exploring a device that seems like it could hav…

Uncovering Secrets Of Logitech M185’s Dongle

[endes0] has been hacking with USB HID recently, and a Logitech M185 mouse’s USB receiver has fallen into their hands. Unlike many Logitech mice, this one doesn’t include a Unifying rec…

Reverse-Engineering Makita Batteries To Revive Them

Modern lithium-ion battery packs for cordless power tools contain an incredible amount of energy, which necessitates that they come with a range of safeties. Although it’s good when the batte…

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 …

Fixing Issues With Knockoff Altera USB Blasters

One exciting feature of hardware development involving MCUs and FPGAs is that you all too often need specific tools to program them, with [Doug Brown] suffering a price tag aneurysm after checking …

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 re…

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 …

Generating A Lost Password By Traveling Back In Time

It’s probable that some of you reading this will have been approached in the past by people who’ve lost the password to their crypto wallets. They hear that you’re involved in som…

Fixing A Camera’s WiFi Connectivity With Ghidra

If your old camera’s WiFi picture upload feature breaks, what do you do? Begrudgingly get a new one? Well, if you’re like [Ge0rg], you break out Ghidra and find the culprit. He’s …

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]&#…

Hunting For Part Numbers: Analyzing The Buck Converter On Mini 560 Modules

Some of us may have recently stumbled over these mysterious ‘Mini 560’ synchronous buck converter modules at various e-shopping websites. These little modules claim to take in 7-20 VDC …

Static Recompilation Brings New Life To N64 Games

Over the past few years a number of teams have been putting a lot of effort into taking beloved Nintendo 64 games, decompiling them, and lovingly crafting them into highly portable C code. This all…

JTAG Hacking An SSD With A Pi: A Primer

[Matthew “wrongbaud” Alt] is well known around these parts for his hardware hacking and reverse-engineering lessons, and today he’s bringing us a JTAG hacking primer that demoes s…

A Master-Class On Reverse-Engineering Six AR Glasses

Augmented reality (AR) tech is getting more and more powerful, the glasses themselves are getting sleeker and prettier, and at some point, hackers have to conquer this frontier and extract as much …

Bypass PoE And Power Your Starlink Terminal Directly

Sometimes, you will want to power a device in a way it wasn’t designed for, and you might find that the device in question is way too tailored to the original power source. Today, [Oleg Kutko…

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 p…

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.…