Sniffing Passwords, Rickrolling Toothbrushes

If you could dump the flash from your smart toothbrush and reverse engineer it, enabling you to play whatever you wanted on the vibrating motor, what would you do? Of course there’s no question: yo…

Reverse Engineering A Classic ThinkPad Battery

The ThinkPad 701 is an iconic laptop series from the mid-90s and is still highly sought after today because of its famous butterfly keybaord. The laptop itself is tiny even by the standards of the …

How Does Your McDonald’s Burger Get To You?

Table service and McDonalds sound as though they should be mutually exclusive as a fundamental of the giant chain’s fast food business model, but in many restaurants there’s the option …

Reverse-Engineering Helps Typesetting Machine Punch Paper Tape Again

[Scott M. Baker] wants a paper tape punch for his retrocomputer collection. That’s fine with us, we don’t judge. In fact,  these electromechanical peripherals from the past have a lot g…

Flipper Zero “Smoking” A Smart Meter Is A Bad Look For Hardware Hackers

Alright, we’re calling it — we need a pejorative equivalent to “script kiddie” to describe someone using a Flipper Zero for annoyingly malign purposes. If you need an exampl…

A Peak Inside A 747 Fuel Gauge

It isn’t that often that we civilians get the chance to closely examine the fantastic internals that make up the modern marvels of avionic engineering. Luckily for us, [Glen] got his hands on…

Reverse Engineering A Better Night’s Sleep

All you want is a decent night’s sleep, so you decide to invest in one of those fancy adjustable beds. At first, it’s fine — being able to adjust the mattress to your needs on the…

Can Hobbyists Bring SGI’s IRIX OS Back To Life?

Irix was the operating system developed by Silicon Graphics from 1988 to 1998. The OS supported the company’s high-end workstations and served in many serious roles. The company cut off suppo…

Google Nest Hub Teardown

Seeing the guts of devices is a fascination that many hackers share. [Txyz] tore down a 2nd gen Google Nest Hub for all of us to enjoy. The video after the break is well produced and relaxing to wa…

North Korean Karaoke Machine Teardown

Karaoke is a very popular pastime in Seoul — there are venues where you can sing on a stage, sing in rooms with your friends, and even sing solo in coin-operated karaoke booths on the bullet …

Tempus Nectit, A DIY Knitting Clock With Instructions

We’re no strangers to unusual clocks here at Hackaday, and some of our favorites make time a little more tangible like [Kyle Rankin]’s knitting clock. Inspired by our coverage of [Siren…

Debugging And Analyzing Real-Mode 16-Bit X86 Code With Fresh Bread

Running a debugger like gdb with real-mode 16-bit code on the x86 platform is not the easiest thing to do, but incredibly useful when it comes to analyzing BIOS firmware and DOS software. Although …

Creating A Game Boy ROM From Pictures

There are very few legal ways of obtaining ROM files for video games, and Nintendo’s lawyers are extremely keen on at least reminding you of the fact that you need to own the game cart before…

Live2D: Silently Subverting Threat Models

In online spaces, VTubers have been steadily growing in popularity in the past few years – they are entertainers using motion capture tech to animate a special-sauce 2D or 3D model, typically…

Customizing The Start-Up Chime On A 1999 G3 IMac

The start-up chime on Macs is probably as recognizable as the default Nokia ringtone in this day and age. Yet much like a ringtone, so too one might want to change the start-up chime on a Mac. This…

[Bunnie] Peeks Inside ICs With IR

If you want to see inside an integrated circuit (IC), you generally have to take the die out of the package, which can be technically challenging and often destroys the device. Looking to improve t…

Reclaiming A Pi-Based Solar Datalogger

There’s quite a few devices on the market that contain a Raspberry Pi as their core, and after becoming a proud owner of a solar roof, [Paolo Bonzini] has found himself with an Entrade ENR-DT…

Making Ghidra Play Nice With RP2040

Developing firmware for RP2040 is undeniably fun, what’s with all these PIOs. However, sometimes you will want to switch it around and reverse-engineer some RP2040 firmware instead. If you&#8…

Aaron Christophel Brings DOOM To Payment Terminal

Payment terminals might feel intimidating — they’re generally manufactured with security in mind, with all manner of anti-tamper protections in place to prevent you from poking around i…