Tag Archives: hacking

Computer

Fixing a WD My passport not working in New Zealand

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I’ve got a backup disk for my photos.
You can connect it via USB and has a SDCard slot for your camera SDCards.
You can also connect to is using it as a Wifi Access Point.
(You can even install twonky!)

The cardreader should automatically copy a inserted card to its internal harddrive.
I’ve tested this at home, but here in New Zealand it woudn’t work.

So i started investigating.
(I was in the middle of nowhere, so I could not search for answers.)

I’ve got the juice ssh client on my phone.
Connecting to the AP will give you a IP, but whats the IP from de WD?
Just use JuiceSSH to make a local connection (to your android) first.
And type: ip neigh
This will give you the ip from neighbouring devices, thats only one .. the WD.

Connect to the WD with ssh using root@IPNUMMER (password should be same as you configured the device with)

Looking at the logs gave me some idea where the problem was.

It would not mount the sdcard! Why, that one is working.
(In de Nikon Camera and using a cardreader with OTG on my android)

I first wrote my own mounter and copy program. That worked, so i could at least backup my photos.
Now I could search for the problem.

My backup script named “script”

mkdir /tmp/fash ; mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /tmp/fash mounts okay!

The sdmount.sh has a problem, it uses the timezone in its script.
This will work when in GMT+12 -> GMT-12.
But we are in NZ .. thats GMT+13

Removing some checks in above script (sdmount.sh)
(Adding timeoffset_min=8)
Made the script work for me again.
When I got home from our trip, I flashed a new firmware version on the device, which corrected the problem.

Computer

Reverse engineering a alpha ticker led scoller

Cobra from the Icecrew got his hands on some Led scrollers.

But they only had a windows program to controll these, so we started some reverseengineering.

First we had to make a serial cable.
(Now we could easily use a logic analyser with protocol decoding)

Next i made a sniffer .. because we only had a windows program to control the display.
So we used a windows machine to control the display by serial, and using a read line to a linux machine to stiff the serial traffic

After some tinkering .. we got this

So we wrote some software to control it using Linux

Bigred and Cobra

Some code

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Get the attention of the sign
print "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0";
# Tell the sign to print the message
$message = "���������������������    ";
print "\001" . "Z" . "01" . "\002" . "AA" . "\x1B" . " b" . $message . "\004";
#print "\001" . "Z" . "01" . "\002" . "AA" . "\x1B" . " a" . $message . 
#"\004";

::::::::::::::
PERLTESTLED
::::::::::::::
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "\0\0\0\0\0\001" . "Z" . "00" . "\002" . "AA" . "\x1B" . " b" . "Test Message" . "\004";

::::::::::::::
PERLTESTLED2
::::::::::::::
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Get the attention of the sign
print "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0";
# Tell the sign to print the message
$message = "<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<";
#print "\001" . "Z" . "01" . "\002" . "AA" . "\x1B" . " b" . $message . "\004";
print "\001" . "Z" . "01" . "\002" . "AA" . "\x1B" . " a" . $message . "\004";

A few days later i wrote a controller using glade. (Could not find more code)

Some time later we found some datasheets which could have helped!