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Reverse Engineering a 1992 DATA Display #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

This is a great project that reuses an LED display found on buses in the 1990s. Translated from the original:

I recently recovered a display bus brand DATA Display (1992, at the sight of datecode components). The display consists of two parts:

Part of a top, consisting of two green segments 12 of dies (7 × 5 each), or a large array of (2 * (12 * 5)) * 7 pixels.

The bottom part, a bit the same, but with red pixels

The bottom part is interesting because it seems to contain a RAM, with external connection (and a NiMH battery to retain RAM) can be upload messages to display. By cons, manufacturers do not have the transmission protocol. It will be a bit boring to reverse-engeenirer.

The top part, it is almost identical. Except that it contains a ROM containing the characters ASCII (at least, their representation in matrix 5 × 7) to display the text. It also has a special connection (RS232, but not too much). It’s going to be boring to do. But I decided to disassemble the upper display and watch how it worked.

Source code, photos and more here!

Filed under: Raspberry Pi,reverse engineering — by jeff, posted May 17, 2013 at 1:00 am

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High Frequency Probing Techniques for Reverse Engineering

Probes have a significant effect on the signals you see on your scope at high speed, and you need to be particularly careful with the GND connector to avoid large ground loops which will distort you signals. Have a look at this informative video on the topic from mikeselectricstuff, showing how to capture some high speed output from an iPod nano.

Filed under: reverse engineering — by Kevin, posted April 18, 2013 at 2:11 am

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Use MAME’s debugger to reverse engineer and extend old games

Use MAME’s debugger to reverse engineer and extend old games via Skinny:

For the Church of Robotron’s installation at Toorcamp 2012, we needed to be able to trigger physical events when game events happened in Robotron 2084. A quick summary for context:

We had an Altar that contained a Linux box that ran MAME and Robotron 2084
We had joysticks that acted as HID devices
Player would kneal down and play the game. As events happened in the game (player death, human death, lasers firing), we would trigger physical events.

We choose to use MAME’s debugger to detect game events and notify other pieces of software when they happened. This is a quick tutorial for others (and a reminder to ourselves) if you’re interested in doing similar things. We’re going to find out how to detect player death!

The LCD is the least interesting part of your LCD

Adam Mayer dissected an old LCD display into its constituent layers. He writes:

These are seven layers of a backlight from an old laptop LCD. The amount of optical engineering required to produce a nice, even glow from an edge-lit panel is impressive.

The layers include horizontal and vertical polarizing films, a diffusion screen for the backlight, and anti-reflex glass.

Filed under: leds-lcds,reverse engineering — by johngineer, posted March 21, 2013 at 11:05 am

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Decompiling .Net Apps

Working on a driver today, I had an excuse to dust off some long forgotten .Net tools. In case other people aren’t aware of how easy it is to decompile apps written in .Net (and why this is useful even for HW people), have a look at our new learning guide: Decompiling .Net Apps

Filed under: reverse engineering — by Kevin, posted March 19, 2013 at 4:16 pm

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Industrial PID Temperature Controller Teardown

PIDTemperatureController

From Hoektronics:

Last weekend, I went to the Guangzhou markets with my buddy Matt. There was lots of good stuff there, but one of the things that caught my eye were these PID temperature controller modules. Its the sort of industrial process control gear that is normally inaccessible to mortals. Fortunately for me, this was China, so I plunked down 80yuan and took one home with me.

Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation

Fascinating talk about hardware hacking Tamagotchis. Thanks for the tip from Malcolm Tredinnick, who noted: “A nice combination of low-and high-level hardware and software reverse-engineering. Many techniques and tools that will be familiar to regular Adafruit readers in isolation and here they’re all pulled together into a fun story.” I totally agree.

From the YouTube video description from the conference:

Many Tamagotchis Were Harmed in the Making of this Presentation

You might remember Tamagotchi virtual pets from the 1990′s. These toys are still around and just as demanding as ever! This talk covers my attempts to hack the latest Tamagotchis. Starting with the IR interface, and moving down into the hardware, this presentation will discuss techniques for reverse engineering a device with limited inputs, computing power and debugging capabilities.

Recent Tamagotchis are more than just pets. They can talk to their friends over IR, support games on external ROMs and store generations worth of information about their ancestors. This talk goes through the different ways Tamagotchis can be tampered with through these channels, including making Tamagotchis rich and happy over IR, altering their states in persistent memory and writing custom games. It also goes through attempts to dump the Tamagotchi’s code from ROM.

Speaker: Natalie Silvanovich

Event: 29th Chaos Communication Congress [29c3] by the Chaos Computer Club [CCC]

Location: Congress Centrum Hamburg (CCH); Am Dammtor; Marseiller Straße; 20355 Hamburg; Germany