Collaborate Disseminate
We’d wager most hackers are familiar with FTDI as the manufacturer of the gold standard USB-UART interfaces. Before parts like the ultra cheap CH340 and CP2102 became common, if you needed to turn a USB cable into a TTL UART device, “an FTDI” (probably an FT232RL) was the way to …read more
Many of us think of FPGAs as some new cutting edge technology, but the fact of the matter is that they’ve been around for quite some time. They’ve just traditionally been used in hardware that’s too expensive for us lowly hackers. A case in point is the Cisco HWIC-3G-CDMA WAN …read more
By now most of us have used a Raspberry Pi at some level or another. As a headless server it’s a great tool because of its price point, and as an interface to the outside world the GPIO pins are incredibly easy to access with a simple Python script. For …read more
Continue reading A Raspberry Pi is a Hardware Hacker’s Swiss Army Knife
When Pano Logic went out of business in 2012, their line of unique FPGA-based thin clients suddenly became a burden that IT departments didn’t want anything to do with. New and used units flooded the second-hand market, and for a while you could pick these interesting gadgets up for not …read more
Got $4,000 to spend? Even if you don’t, keep reading — especially if you develop with FPGAs. Exostiv’s FPGA debugging setup costs around $4K although if you are in need of debugging a complex FPGA design and your time has any value, that might not be very expensive. Then again, most of us have a lot of trouble justifying a $4,000 piece of test gear. But we wanted to think about what Exostiv is doing and why we don’t see more of it. Traditionally, debugging FPGAs meant using JTAG and possibly some custom blocks that act like a logic analyzer …read more
Our own [Brian Benchoff] asked this same question just six months ago in a similar headline. At that time, the answer was no. Or kind of no. Some exploits existed but with some preconditions that limited the impact of the bugs found in Intel Management Engine (IME). But 2017 is an unforgiving year for the blue teams, as lot of serious bugs have been found throughout the year in virtually every fields of computing. Researchers from Positive Technologies report that they found a flaw that allows them to execute unsigned code on computers running the IME. The cherry on top …read more
The Teensy is a powerful ARM-based development board with loads of features that can do fun stuff with USB as well. Like many dev boards, it uses a less powerful processor as an interface. Teensy designer [Paul Stoffregen] added a debug header to allow direct SWD JTAG access to the main chip, but the interface microcontroller has to be silenced for that to work, and the code to do so is still in progress.
Impatient, [Erich Styger] documents the changes he made to add support for the J-Link SWD protocol by removing the offending NXP Kinetis KL02Z that serves as …read more
Wouldn’t it be great if there were just one standard for attaching to, programming, and debugging hardware? If you could just plug in and everything would just work? Dream on, dreamer! But of course we hobbyists aren’t the only people to suffer from multiple standards. Industry has the same problems, writ large. In response to the proliferation of smart devices — microcontrollers, sensors, and their friends — on any given PCB makes it difficult to test them all, much less their function as a system.
The Joint Test Action Group (JTAG) got together in the mid-80s to make automated …read more
We don’t always JTAG, but when we do, we use a Black Magic Probe. It’s a completely open ARM-chip debugging powerhouse. If you program the small ARM chips and you don’t have a BMP, you need a BMP. Right now, one of the main producers of these little gems is running a Kickstarter where you can get your hands on a nicely made one and/or a 1Bitsy STM32F415-based development board.
Why is the BMP so great? First off, it’s got a JTAG and a UART serial port in one device. You can flash the target, run your code, use the …read more
Continue reading Black Magic Probe: The Best ARM JTAG Debugger?
Mobile Forensics is AWESOME! Teamwork is AWESOME! Researching Windows Phone 8 is … er, “no comment” 😉 Our previous Windows Phone posts here and here described the call history/SMS/contacts areas of Windows Phone 8.0 and provided their respective … Continue reading "Awesome" Windows Phone 8 Stuff
