Miguel writes :

The analyzer has become my best travel companion. It’s very discrete: everyone think you are playing with a mobile phone!. You can see in a moment what are the used frecuencies / channels at your location. One of the most interesting things if to carry it in the pocket in exposure mode and walk sometime in your neighborhood. In this way you can find easily what are the free frecuencies or channels. With the time, I learned how to distinguish between different device

Mobile 2.4 GHz Spectrum Analyzer: [via HackADay]

That is an officer of the law holding a modified pin pad discovered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. You can barely see it in this image but among other mods the pin pad has a BlueSmirf module attached to it. This allows someone sitting within ~100 feet away to capture all of the information transmitted by the pin pad including credit card information and the PIN number. Now SparkFun commented on this issue , and I agree with Nate that all things can be used for good or evil including their products. I don’t believe SparkFun should be blamed in any way for this, it’s the companies that make the pin-pads that should take care more of the security of their devices.

Bad guys will always try to trick the systems but it’s the companies who make credit card processing devices that should be one step ahead of them. I’ve read the comments on SparkFun’s blog and someone who works in a company that makes this devices said that they have all kind of security features that will make the pin pad unusable once someone tried to open it without authorisation. Someone else said they even have an internal battery for monitoring even if the pin-pad is unplugged or has it’s main battery removed so I’m not sure how someone managed to mount the BlueSmirf inside the pin-pad.

For all tweeter users that possess some hardware hacking skills, this is the Tweeter Wireless Display. It is basically a modified wireless router, stripped of its original case and mounted on a custom made wooden chassis. The text is displayed on a small screen which is mounted on the top side of the chassis.

The router used in this project is the WL-520-GU from Asus, which features a 4-port switch and supports both IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g. The device uses OpenWRT to run a Python script that fetches the 20 most recent tweets. The script is taken from a USB flash memory and the information is displayed on a serial alphanumeric LCD from Sparkfun.

The project is entitled Tweetser, a combination from ‘tweet’ and ‘serial’ and is surely an appealing piece of equipment for any tweeter lover out there, especially for the ones that are also hardware enthusiasts. I personally still think that a PC would be more suitable for this kind of things as it also features… you know, a keyboard and a slightly bigger screen. Nevertheless, it’s still a nifty little project that can be useful if you’re a tweeter maniac.

Tweeter Wireless Display: [Link] – [via]

The Wired Equivalent Privacy is an encryption algorithm that was introduced in 1997 for securing wireless networks and was designed to offer the privacy of a wired network in a wireless one. Known to have security flaws since 2001, WEP was superseded by WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) in recent years, but is still used in many wireless networks.

BackTrack is a Linux distribution which is distributed as a Live CD and can be used for performing security tests and other various tasks. Using BackTrack’s command line, called Konsole, and a few nifty commands, you can crack the WEP encryption and log onto the network. This tutorial uses BackTrack version 3, as version 4 is only in pre-release stage.

First and foremost, you will need a wireless adapter capable of packet injection and, of course, a wireless network nearby that uses WEP. The first thing you need to do is get a list of network interfaces and then fake a MAC address on your network interface. Next, you get a list of wireless network interfaces and look for one that uses WEP encryption. The final step is collecting enough data packets to make the crack successful (this requires that the signal is strong, so collecting of the data doesn’t take ages).

WEP has been cracked before and you can find lots of other tutorials on the Internet, so it’s no secret that it’s not a secure encryption standard. This one though can help even someone with just a little networking experience to successfully crack WEP. It only takes a few adequate tools and a little patience and voila! – you’re hacking. Detailed BackTrack commands, as well as screenshots and additional information is available in the link.

BackTrack WEP Cracking: [Link] – [via]

You like listening to radio and your favourite stations use Internet broadcasting? Or you’re sick of commercials between songs or the radio man spoiling the song with some announcement? Here is an award worthy project for you. With this wifi radio you have wireless connectivity to the Internet so you have a huge variety of radio stations to tune in, mp3 decoding, 44.1kHz 16 bit stereo audio, 4W amplifier with two 4 inch speakers, LCD display all this in a very nice vintage looking compact case. Total cost under 100$.

Asus WL-520GU was the choice for the wireless router. For under 50$ it’s a good platform for an embedded Linux system, its only shortcoming would be that it lacks built-in audio. This problem was solved with an USB audio adapter SYBA SD-CM-UAUD for 8$. Notice however the Asus router only supports USB 1.1 which is enough for audio, WL-500GP v2 can be used for USB 2.0. The router has a Broadcom BCM5354KFBG SoC CPU running at 200Mhz, 4MB flash and 16MB SRAM.

The most important part of the project is hacking the WL-520GU. Since it is just a router you will need to write new firmware to turn in into a wifi radio. This is done on the serial port which is pretty easy to access. The chosen open source Linux distribution that supports this router was OpenWRT. In the link you will find a precompiled image, thanks to the designer and builder of this project.

The LCD interface communicates with the WL-520GU by serial using ATmega168 microcontroller. On one of the analog inputs of the Atmel a potentiometer is connected and rotating the pot will make the radio jump to next station.

This is really an advanced project and i just love how it turned out. Lots of information on how to build one yourself is available in the link and I’m sure if you decide to go for it you will not regret it.

DIY Wifi Radio: [Link]

Wireless equipment ranging from mobile phones to routers, car alarms or PC peripherals have become an important part of our lives. Most of us use at least one wireless device every day whether you’re at home or at work because it’s a lot more comfortable having no wires connected.

Keykeriki (from ‘kikeriki’, the sound of a rooster) is a very useful tool for verifying the security level of transmissions from someone’s wireless keyboard. An OpenSource hardware and software project currently working with Microsoft keyboards and free for non-commercial use, the Keykeriki can also demonstrate sniffing attacks for educational purposes only.

Using the Texas Instruments TRF7900 chip, an ATMEL ATMEGA microcontroller and an SDCard interface for logging, the sniffer also has a USART channel for future hardware add-ons that the designers like to call ‘backpacks’. The device requires a 5V power source and can also be powered using the USB port. It can be used with a terminal application or the keyctrl software partially provided in the software package of the project.

Being a very small and flexible project in terms of hardware, but quite ambitious in terms of information provided to the user, most features are built within the software. And it’s a pretty long feature list, with radio frequency channel switching, signal strength display, encryption key handling, deciphering Microsoft’s XOR based encryption, decoding of keystrokes from Microsoft 27Mhz based keyboards and more.

Entitled as ‘universal’, the creators of the sniffer pride themselves with having decoded Logitech keyboards transmissions and they plan on adding this feature in a future release. They are also working on designing a few Backpacks, including LCD display and Iphone interface and they plan on providing ready-made boards at a fair price in just a few weeks.

While the project raises some questions about privacy, it’s definitely an interesting and useful one. As I have mentioned before, it’s an OpenSource project, so coding and hardware schematics are available for download in the link below.

Keykeriki, the universal wireless keyboard sniffer: [Link] – [Via]

One of the best known video games of all time is Tetris, the puzzle video game designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. Released in 1984 and then ported on the IBM PC, Tetris is now available for game consoles, mobile phones, PDAs and computers and is regarded by many as one of the most popular game ever. Usually, the game is controlled with buttons for rotation and movement operations. This one is a bit different: the player uses a wireless glove to control the blocks and the movements mimic real-world motion. That’s right, it’s ‘Tetris meets Johnny Mnemonic’.

The pièce de résistance of the project, the wonder glove, is made from a rollerblading wrist guard and it has two accelerometers, one for z axis running on 5V, the other for x/y running on 3V. The glove uses averaging to execute a rotation left or right, a move left or right or a slam down and it can be used both in wireless mode or with a tethered connection.

The wireless communication is done with a Radiotronix RCT-433-AS transmitter and a Radiotronix RCR-433-RP receiver using 433 Mhz radio and a BAUD rate of 4800. Testing of the glove revealed interference problems and the wired connection feature was added to the project, so the user could switch between communication modes quite easily, with the change of one cable.

Some tradeoffs were made, involving the transmitter circuit, the accelerometers (a more accurate accelerometer means more accurate readings from the glove movements) and the amount of averaging resulting in delays between data, but the final game is playable and can be quite a challenge for the casual Tetris player. The creators of the glove however don’t have any plans on patenting their work.

Tetris with a wireless glove: [Link] – [via]

Many times you need to remotely control a relay, electrovalve or some other electronic or electromechanical device, and many times wirelessly. With XBee modules things become very easy. Very versatile and having small dimensions it is easy to add it to your projects.

In this demonstration the modules are set to wirelessly control two types of relays, standard and latched. To achieve this you will need to configure the analog inputs of the Xbee to digital I/O. In the given schematics the standard relay is driven by a general purpose NPN transistor T1. Some relays already have the protection diode incorporated, if not you will need to use D1 as shown.

The latch relay is driven by a hex inverter IC connected as a buffer. Each inverter changes the logic level from high to low and from low to high so you must cascade two inverters to preserve the logic level. This type of relay is activated by pulses so it needs a small amount of current. Even so the output capability of a single inverter might not be enough so the remaining inverters are connected in parallel.

On the transmitter side you have two push buttons connected between ground and the digital I/O ports of the XBee. There is no need for pull-up resistors because this is done internally in the Xbee.

This demonstration has lots of practical applications. You can connect almost anything to those relays or use the digital output of the module with a buffer to control other devices or transmit information.

Wireless Relay Control with XBee: [Link] – [Via]

In most of the projects the XBee modules appear as interfaces, serving only for the wireless connection, but the they can do much more, they have seven analog input channels, nine digital I/O channels and two PWM outputs, it is almost like a micro controller the difference is that you can’t actually load your own control firmware, this needs to run on the PC, but this can be taken as a feature used in your advance since you can make complicated applications in any language and communicate over the serial port. The USB to serial converter should be a problem because the operating system will use it as a virtual serial port, no USB programming required.

With this advanced inputs and outputs you could make complicated robotics applications, smart sensors, and even closed loop systems, not being limited by the code size and speed only your imagination is the limit.

These features of the XBee are available only with the latest firmware version 10A1, if your module is older than you need to update the firmware.

Standalone XBee: [Link]