Category Archives: sparkfun

Hackaday’s Open Hardware Summit Experience

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Last week was the Open Hardware Summit in Denver Colorado. This yearly gathering brings together the people and businesses that hold Open Hardware as an ideal to encourage, grow, and live by. There was a night-before party, the summit itself which is a day full of talks, and this year a tour of a couple very familiar open hardware companies in the area.

I thought this year’s conference was quite delightful and am happy to share with you some of the highlights.

Talks I Enjoyed: Textiles and Password Case Law

I really had fun with the keynote that kicked off …read more

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Hackaday Links: October 8, 2017

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On the top of the popcorn pile for this weekend is an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit that was offered without comment or commentary. [Lady Ada] is holding some sort of fancy incorporation papers for Radio Shack. The smart money is that Adafruit just bought these at the Radio Shack auction a month or so ago. The speculation is that Adafruit just bought Radio Shack, or at least the trademarks and other legal ephemera. Either one is cool, but holy crap please bring back the retro 80s branding.

A Rubik’s Cube is a fantastic mechanical puzzle, and if you’ve never taken …read more

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Seek Out Scammers With Skimmer Scanner

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Last week we reported on some work that Sparkfun had done in reverse engineering a type of hardware card skimmer found installed in gasoline pumps incorporating card payment hardware. The device in question was a man-in-the-middle attack, a PIC microcontroller programmed to listen to the serial communications between card reader and pump computer, and then store the result in an EEPROM.

The devices featured a Bluetooth module through which the crooks could harvest the card details remotely, and this in turn provides a handy way to identify them in the wild. If you find a Bluetooth connection at the pump …read more

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New Android app lets people detect credit card skimmers at gas pumps

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Cheap, quick and effective, credit card skimmers plague ATMs and point-of-sale posts around the world, stealing credit card numbers while being almost impossible to spot with the naked eye. That’s why Nate Seidle, CEO of the open source electronics firm SparkFun, developed a free, open-source skimmer detection app on Android that looks for the Bluetooth signals Seidle found on the skimmers he tested. Seidle built the app after his local police department asked him to take apart three skimmers that were found nearby gas pumps to see if it was possible to alert the victims. That was accomplished, but the developers went a step further and put together Skimmer Scanner to look for skimmers broadcasting 10-15 feet over Bluetooth as HC-O5 with the password 1234. Skimmers take seconds to install once an attacker acquires one of the physical master keys for a gas pump or ATM, opens up the machine, unplugs the credit card reader from the main controller, […]

The post New Android app lets people detect credit card skimmers at gas pumps appeared first on Cyberscoop.

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Seriously, Is It That Easy To Skim Cards?

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We’ve all heard of card skimmers, nefarious devices that steal the identity of credit and debit cards, attached to ATMs and other machines in which unsuspecting consumers use them. Often they have relied on physical extraction of data from the card itself, such as by inserting a magnetic stripe reader in a fake ATM fascia, or by using a hidden camera to catch a picture of both card and user PIN entry.

The folks at Sparkfun write about an approach they received from a law enforcement agency bearing a selection of card skimmer devices that had been installed in gasoline …read more

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Seriously, Is It That Easy To Skim Cards?

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We’ve all heard of card skimmers, nefarious devices that steal the identity of credit and debit cards, attached to ATMs and other machines in which unsuspecting consumers use them. Often they have relied on physical extraction of data from the card itself, such as by inserting a magnetic stripe reader in a fake ATM fascia, or by using a hidden camera to catch a picture of both card and user PIN entry.

The folks at Sparkfun write about an approach they received from a law enforcement agency bearing a selection of card skimmer devices that had been installed in gasoline …read more

Continue reading Seriously, Is It That Easy To Skim Cards?→

Sparkfun’s Alternate Reality Hardware

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SparkFun has a new wing of hardware mischief. It’s SparkX, the brainchild of SparkFun’s founder [Nate Seidle]. Over the past few months, SparkX has released breakout boards for weird sensors, and built a safe cracking robot that got all the hacker cred at DEF CON. Now, SparkX is going off on an even weirder tangent: they have released The Prototype. That’s actually the name of the product. What is it? It’s a HARP, a hardware alternate reality game. It’s gaming, puzzlecraft, and crypto all wrapped up in a weird electronic board.

The product page for The Prototype is exactly …read more

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Reflective Sensor Becomes Kart Racing Lap Counter

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Once you have a track and a kart to race on it, what’s missing? A lap counter that can give your lap times in hardcopy, obviously! That’s what led [the_anykey] to create the Arduino-based Lap Timer to help him and his kids trim those precious seconds off their runs, complete with thermal printer for the results.

The hardware uses an infrared break-beam sensor module (a Velleman PEM10D) to detect when a kart passes by. This module is similar to a scaled-up IR reflective object sensor; it combines an IR emitter and receiver on one end, and is pointed at a …read more

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Safe Cracking is [Nate’s] Latest R&D Project

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We love taking on new and awesome builds, but finding that second part (the “awesome”) of each project is usually the challenge. Looks like [Nathan Seidle] is making awesome the focus of the R&D push he’s driving at Sparkfun. They just put up this safe cracking project which includes a little gamification.

The origin story of the safe itself is excellent. [Nate’s] wife picked it up on Craig’s List cheap since the previous owner had forgotten the combination. We’ve seen enough reddit/imgur threads to not care at all what’s inside of it, but we’re all about cracking the code.

The …read more

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Safe Cracking is [Nate’s] Latest R&D Project

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We love taking on new and awesome builds, but finding that second part (the “awesome”) of each project is usually the challenge. Looks like [Nathan Seidle] is making awesome the focus of the R&D push he’s driving at Sparkfun. They just put up this safe cracking project which includes a little gamification.

The origin story of the safe itself is excellent. [Nate’s] wife picked it up on Craig’s List cheap since the previous owner had forgotten the combination. We’ve seen enough reddit/imgur threads to not care at all what’s inside of it, but we’re all about cracking the code.

The …read more

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