Hardware hackers love the Nokia 5110 LCD. Or at least, they love the clones of it. You can pick up one of these panels for a couple bucks wherever electronic bits and bobs are sold, and integrating it into your project is a snap thanks to all the code and documentation floating around out there. But while it might be cheap and reliable, it’s not a terribly exciting component.

Which is perhaps why [Miguel Reis] thought he’d spruce it up a bit with an RGB backlight. While we’ll admit that this hack is mostly about looking cool, it’s not entirely without practical application. If your gadget experiences some kind of fault, having it flash the LCD bright red is sure to get somebody’s attention from across the room.

The board itself is very straightforward, with four MHPA1010RGBDT RGB LEDs and a couple of passives to keep them happy. The Nokia 5110 LCD module just pops right on, and beyond the extra pins added for the three LED colors, gets wired up the same as before. The backlight LEDs just need a few spare GPIO pins on your microcontroller to drive them, and away you go.

[Miguel] is currently selling his RGB version of this iconic LCD on Tindie for only a couple dollars more than the standard version, so it looks like a pretty cheap way to add a little bling to your next project.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/04/an-rgb-backlight-for-the-nokia-5110-lcd/

The great thing about word clocks is that while they all follow the same principle of spelling out the time for you, they come in so many shapes, sizes, and other variations, you have plenty of options to build one yourself. No matter if your craft of choice involves woodworking, laser cutting, PCB design, or nothing physical at all. For [Yasa], it was learning 3D modeling combined with a little trip down memory lane that led him to create a fully functional word clock as a rendered animation in Blender.

Inspired by the picture of a commercially available word clock, [Yasa] remembered the fun he had back in 2012 when he made a Turkish version for the Pebble watch, and decided to recreate that picture in Blender. But simply copying an image is of course a bit boring, so he turned it into an actual, functioning clock by essentially emulating a matrix of individually addressable LEDs using a custom texture he maps the current time to it. And since the original image had the clock positioned by a window, he figured he should have the sun move along with the time as well, to give it an even more realistic feel.

Of course, having the sun situation in real-time all year round would be a bit difficult to render, so [Yasa] choose to base the scene on the sun during spring equinox in his hometown Stockholm instead. You can see the actual clock showing your local time (or whichever time / time zone you set your device to) on his website, and his write-up is definitely a fun read you should check out if you’re interested in all the details or 3D modeling in general — or just to have a look at a time lapse of the clock itself. As he states, the general concept could be also used to model other word clocks, so who knows, maybe we will see this acrylic version or a PCB version of it in the future.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/04/a-word-clock-you-dont-have-to-actually-build-to-enjoy/

The great thing about word clocks is that while they all follow the same principle of spelling out the time for you, they come in so many shapes, sizes, and other variations, you have plenty of options to build one yourself. No matter if your craft of choice involves woodworking, laser cutting, PCB design, or nothing physical at all. For [Yasa], it was learning 3D modeling combined with a little trip down memory lane that led him to create a fully functional word clock as a rendered animation in Blender.

Inspired by the picture of a commercially available word clock, [Yasa] remembered the fun he had back in 2012 when he made a Turkish version for the Pebble watch, and decided to recreate that picture in Blender. But simply copying an image is of course a bit boring, so he turned it into an actual, functioning clock by essentially emulating a matrix of individually addressable LEDs using a custom texture he maps the current time to it. And since the original image had the clock positioned by a window, he figured he should have the sun move along with the time as well, to give it an even more realistic feel.

Of course, having the sun situation in real-time all year round would be a bit difficult to render, so [Yasa] choose to base the scene on the sun during spring equinox in his hometown Stockholm instead. You can see the actual clock showing your local time (or whichever time / time zone you set your device to) on his website, and his write-up is definitely a fun read you should check out if you’re interested in all the details or 3D modeling in general — or just to have a look at a time lapse of the clock itself. As he states, the general concept could be also used to model other word clocks, so who knows, maybe we will see this acrylic version or a PCB version of it in the future.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/04/a-word-clock-you-dont-have-to-actually-build-to-enjoy/

The great thing about word clocks is that while they all follow the same principle of spelling out the time for you, they come in so many shapes, sizes, and other variations, you have plenty of options to build one yourself. No matter if your craft of choice involves woodworking, laser cutting, PCB design, or nothing physical at all. For [Yasa], it was learning 3D modeling combined with a little trip down memory lane that led him to create a fully functional word clock as a rendered animation in Blender.

Inspired by the picture of a commercially available word clock, [Yasa] remembered the fun he had back in 2012 when he made a Turkish version for the Pebble watch, and decided to recreate that picture in Blender. But simply copying an image is of course a bit boring, so he turned it into an actual, functioning clock by essentially emulating a matrix of individually addressable LEDs using a custom texture he maps the current time to it. And since the original image had the clock positioned by a window, he figured he should have the sun move along with the time as well, to give it an even more realistic feel.

Of course, having the sun situation in real-time all year round would be a bit difficult to render, so [Yasa] choose to base the scene on the sun during spring equinox in his hometown Stockholm instead. You can see the actual clock showing your local time (or whichever time / time zone you set your device to) on his website, and his write-up is definitely a fun read you should check out if you’re interested in all the details or 3D modeling in general — or just to have a look at a time lapse of the clock itself. As he states, the general concept could be also used to model other word clocks, so who knows, maybe we will see this acrylic version or a PCB version of it in the future.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/04/a-word-clock-you-dont-have-to-actually-build-to-enjoy/

Reverse engineering or modifying a device often requires you to access the firmware stored on a microcontroller. Since companies are usually not fond of people who try to peek into their proprietary data, most commercial devices are readout protected. [rumpeltux] ran into this problem when he tried to dump the firmware on an HC-12 wireless serial communication module for yet undisclosed reasons. Hacking into the device was a challenge that he gladly accepted and in the end, he succeeded by building a low-cost setup for voltage glitching.

Voltage glitching is a form of fault injection that has, e.g., been successfully used to hack the Playstation Vita. It involves the injection of voltage spikes on the power line in order to force the bootloader to skip security checks. The hard thing is trying to find the right shape of the waveform and the best way to inject the signal.

While there are already open-source boards for fault injection like ChipWhisperer, [rumpeltux] chose to build his own setup around an FPGA. By using a cheap EPM240 board, some MOSFET, and a USB-to-Serial converter, the total costs of the glitching setup were under 20 Euros. [rumpeltux] then recorded a larger number of voltage traces on the VCC pin around the reset phase and analyzed the differences. This helped him to pinpoint the best time for injecting the signal and refine the search space. After some unsuccessful attempts to glitch the VCC and GND pins, he got lucky when using one of the voltage regulator pins instead.

Be sure not to miss Samy Kamkar’s talk at Supercon 2019 if you want to know more about hardware attacks or how to eavesdrop on people using a bag of potato chips.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/04/the-cheap-way-to-glitch-an-stm8-microcontroller/