Ericsson PTF-118 pager teardown

A recent ebay score was a job lot of 5 Ericsson pagers for the grand total of £10. The 'buy it now' temptation was too great and before I'd had a chance to look into the feasibility of getting these 90's era devices to do anything fun it was too late, I'd clicked the button.

Between committing to buy and the devices arriving, I'd managed to at least figure out that there are plenty of warning pages on ebay explaining that BT pagers will no longer work. Looking back, the seller had cunningly covered the blatant BT logo on the top right of the box with convenient positioning:

Linksys EG008W switch repair

I've had a Linksys EG008W Gigabit ethernet switch for some time now, and other than a noisy fan and no jumbo frames it has worked pretty well over the last seven years or so. It comes in a case that's rather definitive for Linksys.

Sadly, in the last few days it has started acting up in the form of random resets. It's now got to the point where it's spending more time in reset than switching, which makes it rather useless unless you want a notwork. So, now's a good time to tear it apart!

Hacking a ScoutGuard camera - part 2

Just a quick look at some of the hardware used by the ScoutGuard 550 wildlife camera.

Front

There are several test pads on the front side of the board and these will be explored in a later post. Hopefully the double row of pins above the serial port are JTAG but their actual purpose is currently unknown.

Hacking a ScoutGuard camera - part 1

A while ago I picked up a ScoutGuard 550 wildlife camera with the grand plan of capturing interesting wildlife in local woods.

Fast forward a couple of years and with nothing but pigeon shots to show I decided to have a go at tackling one of the features always bugged me. Each photo has a logo in the bottom left corner. In reality this isn't a big deal but it did strike me as slightly annoying since I'd paid for the camera and I shouldn't have to advertise on their behalf.

(Ab)using CurrentCost dev boards part 3

In the previous parts, I looked at how things were connected and how the RF transmitter was configured. This time around, I want to see if I can actually transmit something! The PIC16F689 is the microcontroller in use, and Microchip have made the IDE (MPLabX) and a compiler freely available for those running Windows, Mac or Linux.

Ghettotronics

ghettotronics

gɛtəʊˈtrɒnɪks/

noun

1. The branch of physics and technology concerned with the hacking of circuits using 

sub-optimal equipment. Typically carried out in a shed, spare room or somewhere else equally unsuitable for the task at hand.

Quite often when messing with electronics you get to the point where doing something is either too expensive to do properly or too hard to cheaply. For example, you could precision laser decap a chip you want to reverse engineer or you could throw some acid on it and hope for the best. You could buy a multi channel logic analyser or you could try and build one using your spare arduino. You could invest in a rework station for removing chips from a circuit board or you could just try your luck with your soldering iron.

The cheap and probably-going-to-fail-but-fun-trying approach is what I call ghettotronics and I seem to spend a significant amount time involved with it. 

(Ab)using CurrentCost dev boards part 2.5

In parts 1 and 2, I flew over the board, how the things were connected and the data that was sent over the SPI bus. I didn't really cover how I got that data out of the device, and Billy picked me up on that. So I thought I should write something to rectify this situation.

If you remember previously, I'd posted a picture that had the pins marked on it. This is really handy reference, as it makes connections plain. From reading the datasheet, there's three pins that are "interesting" at this point. What's really handy is that they're next to each other!