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Hack

Life hack (or life hacking) is any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life. The term was primarily used by computer experts who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow in ways other than programming. The terms hack, hacking, and hacker have a long history of ambiguity in the computing and geek communities, particularly within the free and open source software crowds.

Reverse Engineering the M6 Smart Fitness Bracelet

“Following a year and a half of sitting inside the house, I set out to improve my wellbeing by getting a new fitness tracker. It worked out better than I expected - hacking on it kept me busy for a couple …

A Pixel Purse LED Cube Controlled by a Cisco 3G Modem

“I presented this project at BangBangCon West 2020, but never got around to publish a blog post about it. A 10 minute talk is not enough to cover some technical aspects, and since I’m starting to forget them, it …

Hacking eInk Price Tags

“Repurposing boring eInk electronic shelf labels / price tags into useful photo frames / status displays, with blackjack and hookers custom firmware and greyscale! Quick video (partially sped up) here: [LINK]. There you can see association, image download with progress bar, and …

How I gained real control of an Echo

“The beginning For more than 15 years I’ve built my own “Home Automation” components. Nothing fancy, though maybe back then it was. It started with some colored LED spots under my couch connected to my Ethernet via a micro …

Pwn the ESP32 Forever: Flash Encryption and Sec. Boot Keys Extraction

“I wanted to close my investigation by targeting the two major security features: Secure Boot Flash Encryption My final goal is to achieve a PERSISTENT exploit, bypassing the Secure Boot and the Flash Encryption. In this report, I disclose a …

Reducing Sleep Current in ATTiny Digispark

“The ATTiny85 is a nice cheap micro-controller useful for standalone applications with a small amount of I/O and not needing connectivity like wifi. A convenient way of using these is with the Digispark type modules as they incorporate a …

Automated Unlocking of nRF51 Series SoCs with nrfsec

“Recently, while conducting an assessment for a product based on the nRF51822 System on Chip (SoC), I found my target’s debug interface was locked – standard stuff. Reading up on the nRF51 series SoCs revealed that this is how these …

How to Mod a Servo to Get Closed Loop Feedback

“While driving a servo with a microcontroller (as Arduino), you can only give him orders of target location (in PPM signal). With this order, the servo will move to this target location. But it’s not instantaneous! You don’t …

Hacked Digital Vernier Caliper Using Arduino

“So, what about doing some measurements with your Digital Vernier Caliper and having your Arduino to do some work with these measurements ? Maybe Saving them, Doing some based-on calculations or adding these measurements to a feedback loop from your mechanical …

Hacking a Luminator bus sign

“Use a RasPi to control a Luminator sign using Wifi Step-by-step instructions to reverse engineer and modify a Luminator bus sign, adding a Raspberry Pi for control over WiFi. The Port City Makerspace gifted our makerspace a pair of Luminator …