On one of the usual sources of weird electronics I came across quiet unusual SFP+ module and could not resist buying it to see how it works. For now I was unable to make it work, but at least I made few photos of its internals. It turned out its main part is obscure chip made by Semtech and described as GN1157, which serves as laser diode driver. Obviously obtaining datasheet is impossible even in China. However, thanks to being able to see the board, I was able to reverse engineer some part of its pinout. Continue reading “Pinout of laser driver for CPRI SFP+ module – GN1157”→
I had a project in mind featuring rain sensor, present in Peugeot 407 car, among others, probably. However, reality is that it is on my todo list for years now and I don’t think I will do it ever. But, I already bought the sensor in the past and it was lying in my drawer. So why not to disassemble it and figure out the pinout.
Identification
To be precise in what I am talking about, here are some magic values, I know about this thing:
GF-07 is dirt-cheap GPS locator. You put SIM card in it, send SMS and you know where it is. That’s it. But not for me. I like to know what I am using, especially if it is that cheap and such obscure device as this one. It comes together with manual that is written in so bad English that I barely understand anything. Immediately after opening SIM slot, one can see few test pads. Fortunately all of them are described in silkscreen. Let’s see what can be done with it as a one-evening hack.
This device could easily be found at the Chinese sellers. They advertise them as DS150E. Under the hood there is nice STM32 and STM8 pair. One is present on main PCB (in my case TCS MAIN V6.0), the other on relay board (TCS+RELAY V3.0). Both chips have their ST-Link headers broken out. If one want to read/write the firmware installed in internal flash, it should be as easy as connecting few of these pins. Continue reading “New VCI+A-BT (DS150E) ST-Link pinout”→
As I wrote few months ago, I bought tiny WiFi camera, advertised as a spy camera or nannycam. This week, I decided to work on the topic a bit. However, due to some serious failure, I alarmed on Twitter, I was not able to connect to its WiFi hotspot anymore. Therefore I had to use UART to recover it from backup. Below you can find parameters needed to connect to this cam. At first however I want to present any identification numbers, that might be useful to confirm it is the same device, as it has no real name.
Identification
Device overview (rubber package already stripped from PCB)
As can be seen in picture on the right, the device consists of main PCB, camera with tape cable, battery pack and optional USB cable for charging. To be able to reach UART header, I had to strip the rubber package from main board. Below I was able to see two identification strings:
HB-WIFI-Z6 – this is most likely the name of the board, unfortunately neither Google or even Taobao does not know it
MS-ME198407 – this is very interesting, as it seems to mean some internal name of laptop computer (don’t know who is the vendor)
Furthermore on camera tape there is one more magic string – HY-OV9712-6. After first dash it seems to be oh – not to be confused with zero). How do I know it? Because OV9712 is model name of camera optics made by OmniVision and it more or less matches the parameters of the camera.
Last batch of IDs is, at first processor name and vendor, which is quite unusual at least outside China – T10 made by Ingenic, which appear to produce MIPS cores and dev boards for it. Also I can see in logs the board should be called ISVP, which is not necessarily true – see Google. At last cpuinfo says that system type is mango, which appear to be fairly common in cheap Chinese cameras. Continue reading “UART pinout for noname spy camera”→
In this structure magic is always set to 0xf1, type is one of the below values, packed on single byte and length count data that follows this packet, so if it is equal to zero, only those four bytes are transmitted. Continue reading “PPPP API: what I know”→
NOTE: This post was imported from my previous blog – v3l0c1r4pt0r.tk. It was originally published on 24th November 2015.
Airlive WN-151ARM pinout
For curious ones. Here is pinout of serial connection. As you can see UART pins are at J4 header (should have pin 4 labeled and 1 be square).
J4 header
Num.
Function
1
VCC
2
RX
3
TX
4
GND
Edit: Oh, and one more thing: goldpin header, you see in the picture is soldered by me, so do not be surprised if you have to hold wires all the time during the transmission.
Root access
There is also possibility to gain root access without removing the cover and possibly voiding the warranty. You have to connect to router’s AP and enter
http://192.168.1.254/system_command.htm
into your browser (panel authentication required). Now you can execute any command you want with root privileges! So let’s type
/usr/sbin/utelnetd -d &
into Console command field and press Execute button. If everything went well, you should now be able to connect to your router using telnet at its default TCP port 23. After that you should see BusyBox banner and command prompt.
It is worth noting that this hidden console cannot be accessed by unauthorized person, so only router administrator can use this (in theory, in practice there are surely a lot of routers using default credentials and security of httpd binary is unknown).
NOTE: This post was imported from my previous blog – v3l0c1r4pt0r.tk. It was originally published on 31st May 2014.
Some people might wonder: what is the pinout of my router’s serial connection. If you’re a happy owner of TP-Link TD-W8901G and asking that yourself, here is the answer:
TP-Link TD-W8901G’s pinout
In the link below there is also this router’s pinout and moreover author states that to make that port working there is a need to modify some resistors. I have V3.5 of that router and didn’t notice any mod to be necessary.
It is possible to solder goldpins in here and router so far haven’t fried. Of course you can try communicating without stable connection and it even works but after training your fingers while waiting for the firmware download/upload to complete you’ll change your mind, I guarantee:).
PS: that model is the one that was one of the victims of massive DNS changing some time ago so if this is the one you’re using as your bridge to the Internet you may be also interested in this.
PS2: if you have another router and want to find out what is the serial port pinout I recommend going here.
