Hack for hardware

Frequently Asked Questions. International Shipping Info. Send Email. Mon-Fri, 9am to 12pm and 1pm to 5pm U. Mountain Time:. Hardware Hacking is an art, but there are some common methods to modifying devices that can jump-start any good hacking project. The word "hacking" as it pertains to hardware is often misused. In the commonly accepted definition, "hardware hacking" means modifying a piece of existing electronics to use it in a way that it was not necessarily intended.

Even that definition is vague, as it can refer to any method of modifying hardware, be it the enclosure, the electronics, or the behavior. Modifying an enclosure of a device is usually straightforward; drill a hole, cut a slot, etc. When looking to modify a device, sometimes it's hard to know where to start, and what angle of attack to take when hacking something for a purpose for which it was not designed.

If you're looking to hack a piece of hardware, how you approach the hack depends on what you're trying to do. Are you trying to make it wireless? Are you trying to change what it displays? Are you trying to get it to trigger another device? Each hack requires a different angle of attack, and it's difficult to decide on how to proceed if you've never hacked a device before. What follows are some common methods of hardware hacking and the implementations in which they are used.

This is not, by any means, a "how to hack hardware" tutorial. Such an article could not exist in a complete form. The nature of hacking insists that there is always a new creative way to a solution, but these are some common methods that I've used in my experiences.

The first and arguably easiest method of hacking a device is patching into its control mechanism. Most consumer products have at least one button or indicator LED, and the connections for that component are usually easy to find and solder to. With access to button pads, you can attach your own button, relay, or transistor circuit to control it with your own hardware.

For example, if you wanted to make a device wireless, you can connect your wireless device directly to the button pads to drive the button signal high or low depending on what the wireless device receives. I see this kind of implementation all the time. For example, there was recently a write-up on hackaday about a user named Kolumkilli hacking his Keurig coffee maker to be wirelessly controlled. He accomplished this by locating the "brew" button pads and connecting a wireless device.

This kind of hack can be accomplished without digging into the actual programming of the device. Image courtesy of Hackaday. With access to the LED pads on a device, you have a reliable output source from the device. It appears the blog post for this hack has been removed, but in the hack the designers simply soldered to LEDs on the base of the toy to trigger their own device when certain LEDs turned on.

Then they could use the toy as the controller for their own system, without ever having to access the data on the device. Image courtesy of starwars. This method is often used in Circuit Bending. The user wants the device to sound different, so he or she replaces a component usually experimentally to get a different sound out of a device.

This kind of approach isn't relegated to Circuit Bending, though. A lot of interesting hacks have been achieved by replacing a component. For example, replacing bike light bulbs with high-intensity LEDs , or replacing the motors on an off-the-shelf toy car to make it drive dangerously fast.

Image courtesy of Hackedgadgets. One can gather a lot of "private" data from a device with the use of a simple logic analyzer. They were using an assembly house that had some problems with a sub-contractor going under during the pandemic, and the replacement service was somewhat below the expected level of quality, resulting in a significant number of SMT populated boards coming out non-functional.

Obviously, not wanting to pass these on to customers as a debug problem, they set to work on an in-house QA test jig, to give them the confidence to ship kits again. The resulting functional test jig , video, embedded below takes a fairly interesting approach. Skip the video to for the description of the test jig and detailed test descriptions.

By taking an existing known-good PCB, stripping off all the SMT parts, and moving the through hole components to the rear PCB side, pogo pins could be soldered to strategic locations. This compressed the pogos in order to make a firm electrical contact.

A piece of MDF that had been attacked with a dremel did duty as a pressure plate, with cutouts around the SMT component areas to achieve the required uniform board pressure and keeping the force away from the delicate soldered parts.

All this means that with an UUT connected via pogo pins to a through-hole only test PCB, the full circuit would be completed, if and only if the UUT was completely functional, and that means defect-free soldering and defect-free components. Next the firmware was rewritten to do duty as the test controller, which when powered up would step through a sequence of test scenarios and measurements, logging the results to an OLED display and a serial interface.

This rig survived 1, SMT tests without failing, giving [Hans] the confidence to ship out new kits and providing a database of datalog results as a backup should a customer have an issue during final assembly. All-in-all a smart idea to solve a difficult problem, with nary a custom test jig PCB in sight!

These pages have been graced with many a pogo-based test rig over the years. With 40 of the versatile timer chips in a build, you might just get something completely unexpected, like this based eight-bit digital counter. This one comes to us by way of [Astronomermike], who chose to make a digital circuit with nothing but s and a largish handful of passives as his entry in the current Timer Contest.

The ubiquitous timer chip is not exactly the first chip that comes to mind for digital applications, but it does contain an SR latch, which only requires a little persuasion to become a JK flip flop. His initial design for the flip flop that would form the core of the circuit had a pair of s surrounded with a bunch of OR gates and inverters — within the rules of the contest but hardly in its spirit. A lot of the work done in tech-centric jobs is, in a way, imaginary.

Hardware hacking is much more tangible — you can physically feel it. Of course, this has its ups and downs. Dealing with a tangled mess of PHP5 may cause physical pain but dealing with a tangled mess of electronics could straight-up kill you. Another neat thing about hardware hacking is how it helps build skills which are applicable to a wide range of professions. Having hardware hacking skills can open a lot of doors for your career.

If you look at it as hunting down electrons, then it truly feels like you are hacking the very fabric of space and time. In short, hardware hacking is the shiznit! It was more along the lines of finding creative solutions to technological problems. Hardware hacking falls into a similar situation, but still leans more toward the broad original definition. Classical hardware hacking is a quite broad subject, but it generally focuses on modifying a device to solve a problem with the device or its implementation.

This can range from modifications as simple as changing the color of an LED all the way to as complex as developing drop-in replacements for factory boards. While classical hardware hacking is focused on solving problems related to the device itself, security-focused hardware hacking is more of a means to an end.

As such, security-focused hardware hacking tends to be more high-level. Instead, we just want to interface with it enough to do our dirty deeds. Classical will come first, to lay a foundation, and then security-focused will build upon that foundation. Alright, enough backstory. Given the vast array of specialized needs and expensive tools, this is usually a pretty organic process.

I highly recommend starting with a small set of core tools and slowly adding more as needed. At a bear minimum, you will want the following:.

These few tools can get you surprisingly far and can be used to learn the core electronics skills needed for hardware hacking. However, once you have the core tools in your lab, there are a few more that I highly recommend picking up:. Finally, once you start working with surface-mount components and delving into security-focused hardware hacking, you may want to purchase some of the following tools:.

After going through this list and seeing all of the prices, you may be a bit disheartened by how expensive building a home lab can be. I certainly was at first. Remember what I said earlier: building a home lab is an organic process. Start small and add tools as you need them. It might also be a good helpful hint to try out some equipment before you buy.

Now that we have established some foundational tools to outfit our labs, we need to establish some foundational knowledge. Basic Electronics by Randy Sarafan — Instructables.

There are countless resources to teach basic electronics, but these will give you a good running start. You can also go through our other related articles to learn more —. Submit Next Question. By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Forgot Password? This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy.

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