Replacing the Nand Chip on an iPod Nano 3G

I wanted to know if it was possible to replace the NAND chip on an iPod Nano 3G similar to how you can replace the hard drive in a bigger iPod. Turns out it's more complicated than that. I'm making a video about it, I'll post it here as well as more details soon.

Stream Raymarine's Multifunction Displays Anywhere

Raymarine's electronics are not very secure. This is no secret, but there really isn't a drive to reverse engineer or hack them. But the way they're selling their high end solutions for a large amount of money is ridiculous. What even is "SeaTalk"? It's a serial connection. They could have done the same thing with ethernet or just a few wires. It's all a market cornering money grab. So I decided to try and imitate what (I think) is one of their more expensive features: viewing the MFD on a TV screen.

Reverse Engineering HP PCIe Mezzanine Cards - Part 1

This is a big project that's way above my electrical pay-grade. Am I going to do it? Yes. Will it work by the end? Maybe. I've heard conflicting rumors about how tolerant PCIe is supposed to be. One quote I've heard is that you can run PCIe over a wet string. But that might not be the case for server hardware like the HP Blades. But we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. For now, we need to figure out what we're doing and how we're going to do it.

Looking at a DLP Chip From a Projector

DLP chips are pretty neat in a "how do they work?" sort of way. Like, I get how they work, but I guess I don't quite understand why someone thought moving thousands of microscopic mirrors at lightning speeds would be a good idea to produce images. It blows my mind that this technology works at all. The DLP chip has to produce the image on its surface in order to make it come out of the box, so let's tear one down and see if we can make it work without light.

Running a Blade Server Without an Enclosure

I remember when the commercials for IBM Blades aired on TV. I thought the concept was pretty interesting, although at the time I didn't fully understand what was going on. After working with a few HP blades for a while, I get why they're so important. You can put a lot of compute power in a very small amount of space. But in order for many of them to be useful they have to be linked to a midplane in the blade enclosure. Or do they?

Make Something That Isn't A Computer A Computer - Episode 3: Broken IP Camera

This one has been sitting on my shelf for a while now. I've talked about these kinds of cameras before, and now we have the opportunity to see what they're made of - both inside and out - to see what makes them tick, and to see how safe, performant, and reliable they are. We'll look at the firmware to see what's going on inside of it, strip it of all of its camera bits, and make it a generic computer that's somewhat reliable.

Deconstructing a Laptop To Make A Bunch Of Things - Episode 0: Teardown

I enjoy going to surplus stores. Sometimes you can find something really neat in the endless boxes of stuff. That happened the last time I went to my local store. I got a graphics card for my friend's RGB Windows XP build, a cool PCI audio interface card, and a Samsung NP300V5A-A0GUS laptop. It comes complete with a second generation Intel i7, so I figured I'd take this $10 computer and turn it into something. But what if we could turn it into multiple things? We could deconstruct it and make a bunch of things out of it. Sound cool? I think so. And guess what! It's another multi-part post!

Reverse Engineering a DJI Phantom 3 Standard Gimbal

My dad owns a DJI Phantom 3 Standard. For some reason (probably the multiple crashes into trees), the fragile gimbal got the worst of it. Something in it is broken. When you turn the drone on, the gimbal stabilizes, goes weird, and then goes limp. So something isn't right. But I'm not going to try and fix this. I'm going to try and reverse engineer it. I'm fairly certain that this is a single board computer. So let's take it apart, power it up, and see if we can communicate with it.

A Futile Attempt At Bending a DVR To My Will

One of my favorite places in the world is Gateway Electronics in St. Louis. They're an electronic part and surplus store that never fails to delight with their collection of old electronics. The last time I went, however, I found something newish. It was a DirecTV HR23-700 HD DVR box. I looked at the back and it had several really interesting ports: HDMI, eSATA, and two ethernet ports just to name a few. At $10, it was too good to pass up, so I bought it to see what I could do with it. I don't have any immediate plans for this right now mainly because I don't know what's inside. But we're about to find out.

GoPro Karma Stabilizer Teardown

I crashed my drone. Really bad. It literally snapped the Gimbal arm in half. So I had to order another one because I was stupid and I didn't get the extended warranty because I didn't think I'd ever fly that close to low hanging trees. Sinking this much money into a GoPro drone is worth it, though, because I've had nothing but good experiences with their products (although they're not great at figuring out what to do when upside down on the pavement. But, like my dad says, there are two kinds of remote pilots: those who have crashed and those who are going to crash. I guess technically I'm in both categories now. The point is is that I have a broken gimbal and I can take it apart now because there is a less than 0% chance I can fix it and I already have another one.

Reverse Analyzing PHP Malware

Hacking is a problem. Those who wish to damage things for personal benefit (or for fun) are really just bad people. Alas, hacking is a part of our world today and it is never going to go away. So we have to get smarter than the hackers, which means we have to understand how their code works and what it does. I'm sure they're doing this every day with Russian hackers. Personally, I think it's impressive what they're capable of.

But when you hack my mother's website, you've gone too far.

Unraveling Samsung PC Studio 3's SMS Database

Back in the days of flip phone popularity, Samsung was a very popular name. My first phone was a Samsung SGT-T339 (T-Mobile exclusive). This got me through middle school, so as you can imagine the text message functionality was used a lot. Sagas of he said/she said nonsense and other various 7th grade nonsense. I was not above it by any stretch of the imagination. Being as I was (and still am) addicted to archiving everything, I used a program called Samsung PC Studio 3 to unload my text messages when it got full. The database was in some nonstandard format. I wanted to convert it to something I could open in excel, like CSV. So it's time to reverse engineer!