YourITronics

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]

I just discovered this video on youtube, which shows a couple of guys hacking into a building’s light control circuitry to get access to it and turn it into a giant pacman game. I don’t know if it’s real or not, because they are just connecting a bunch of wires without any logic but it sure looks like their having allot of fun doing it and theoretically this is possible. I’m not sure about the legal actions that these guys could be facing if the hacking is indeed true. Leave a comment and tell me what do you think about the hacking, real or fake ?

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]