Reverse Engineering Smart Meters, Now With More Fuming Nitric Acid

If you’re lucky, reverse engineering can be a messy business. Sure, there’s something to be said for attacking and characterizing an unknown system and leaving no trace of having been t…

Wiring An SD Card To A Handspring PDA’s 68K Bus With Only Three SOT23s

In 1998 the founders of Palm had a bit of a falling out with the wildly successful PDA company’s new owners. They set up a new company called Handspring, which enabled them to make PDAs again…

Decoding A ROM From A Picture Of The Chip

Before there were home computers, among the hottest pieces of consumer technology to own was a pocket calculator. In the early 1970s a series of exciting new chips appeared which allowed the imposs…

Hacking BLE To Liberate Your Exercise Equipment

It’s a story we’ve heard many times before: if you want to get your data from the Domyos EL500 elliptical trainer, you need to use a proprietary smartphone application that talks to the…

Current-Based Side-Channel Attacks, Two Ways

Funny things can happen when a security researcher and an electronics engineer specializing in high-speed circuits get together. At least they did when [Limpkin] met [Roman], which resulted in two …

An Extensive Walkthrough On Building Your Own KSP Controller

Having a game-tailored controller is a level-up in more ways than one, letting you perform in-game actions quickly and intuitively, instead of trying to map your actions to a clunky combination of …

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 …

Hackaday Podcast Episode 250: Trains, RC Planes, And EEPROMS In Flames

This week in the Podcast, Elliot Williams is off at Chaos Communication Congress, hearing tales of incredible reverse engineering that got locomotives back up and running, while Al Williams is thin…

Unbricking Trains, Uncovering Shady Behavior

The first clue was that a number of locomotives started malfunctioning with exactly 1,000,000 km on the odometer. And when the company with the contract for servicing them couldn’t figure out…

Reverse-Engineering The Stadia Controller Bluetooth Switching Procedure

Ever since the demise of Google’s Stadia game streaming service, the associated Stadia controllers have found themselves in limbo, with the only way to switch them from the proprietary WiFi m…

Hacking An NFC E-Paper Display From Waveshare With Mystery MCU

These days e-paper (eInk) displays are everywhere, with stores being one of the largest users of smaller, monochrome versions of these persistent displays. This has also made them a solid target of…

The Dark Side Of Hacking XMas Lights, Literally

When looking at the piles of cheap RGB, Bluetooth-controlled LED strips you can find for sale just about anywhere these days, integrating them into a home-automation setup is very tempting. Normall…

The Logg Dogg: How A Mysterious Logging Robot Leads Down Twisting Forestry Paths

There are many places where you’d want to use remotely controlled robots, but perhaps forestry isn’t the first application to come to mind. Yet there are arguments to be made for replac…

Re-Inventing The Single 8 Home Movie Format

[Jenny List] has been reverse-engineering and redesigning the Single8 home movie film cartridge for the modern age, to breathe life into abandoned cine cameras. One of the frustrating things about …

Revive A Sony Vaio P-Series With KiCad’s Background Bitmaps

You might remember that KiCad 7 came out this February, with a multitude of wonderful features. One of them was particularly exciting to see, and the KiCad newsletter even had an animated GIF to pr…

Vectorscope KiCad Redrawing Project

When I saw this year’s Supercon Vectorscope badge, I decided that I had to build one for myself. Since I couldn’t attend in-person, I immediately got the PCBs and parts on order. Noting that the Gi…

Intel V. NEC : The Case Of The V20’s Microcode

Back in the last century, Intel saw itself faced with a need to have ‘second source’ suppliers of its 8088 and 8086 processors, which saw NEC being roped in to be one of those alternati…

Big Red Button Puts Toddler In Command Of Chromecast

Controversial position: the world needs more buttons. We’ve gotten so far away from physical interfaces like buttons, knobs, and switches in favor of sleek but sterile touch-screen “con…

Reverse-Engineering The Mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer

Before the era of digital electronic computers, mechanical analog computers were found everywhere. From the relative simplicity of bomb sights to the complexity of fire control computers on 1940s b…

Ready For The Rapture: This Wind-Up Cassette Player Can Play Anywhere

As useful as electronics are, the need to have some source of power for them can be a bit of an issue, especially for small, portable devices. One of the most low-tech but universally applicable so…