Devices, Open Hardware, and Mobile

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 23, 2026

• Devices/Embedded

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ US authorities say Siemens controllers used for water and other infrastructure are being targeted by hackers — agencies claim threat actors use AI tools to generate exploitation scripts

    “The actors leverage Internet scanning services to find Internet-exposed PLCs running outdated software or that are otherwise poorly protected,” the agency said in its warning. “The U.S. critical infrastructure sectors most targeted by this threat activity include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities. This is not a theoretical risk — it is an active threat. Depending on the specific circumstances, exploitation of poorly protected PLCs could lead to disruption of critical industrial processes, safety incidents, downtime or equipment damage, compromise of sensitive data, compliance violations, and cascading impacts across interconnected systems.”

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Programming an SST39SF040 with the T48 and minipro

    The chip in question is a SST39SF040, an EEPROM in a PLCC package. This necessitated buying a carrier adaptor from AliExpress to allow the T48 to interface with it: [...]

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Hackaday ☛ 555 Makes A Useful Beat Frequency Oscillator

    The build in question concerns the use of a 555 timer IC. It’s seasoned with the right smattering of resistors and capacitors to taste, producing a 455 kHz beat frequency oscillator. This can be injected into the intermediate frequency chain of a receiver, making up for the lack of a steady carrier wave when receiving continuous-wave and single side-band suppressed carrier transmissions. Thanks to a potentiometer in the circuit, it’s tunable, too, from 455 kHz, plus or minus twenty percent or so. Thanks to the versatility of the 555, it’s possible to run the chip on a wide voltage range, anywhere from 4.5 volts to 16 volts, which makes it easy to install in just about any old radio set without requiring adding a specialized power supply. There’s also an alternative design that EDN covered in greater detail some time ago.

  • Hackaday ☛ Building An Analog Geiger Counter

    There are two ranges to use, depending on the magnitude of the radiation source—1 uSv/h, and 10 uSv/h. The high range isn’t particularly high, but as [ludens] notes—”If anything I find pegs that scale, I prefer to run, instead of measuring exactly how much radiation there is! So I don’t need a higher scale than 10µSv/h.”

  • Hackaday ☛ The Shutter Makes This 3D Printed Camera Special

    It’s not the first printable shutter we’ve seen, but it remains the first variable one.

  • Hackaday ☛ Open-Source ExpressLRS Receiver Reaches For Range

    Up to a certain point, the simplest way to increase a radio’s range is to lower the frequency; lower radio frequencies penetrate better through most materials and don’t attenuate as quickly with distance. However, although ELRS can use 900 MHz bands, [Stan]’s receivers primarily use 2.4 GHz. The major improvement is in modulation: unlike other control protocols, which mostly use frequency modulation, or Wi-Fi, which uses phase and amplitude modulation, ELRS uses Chirp Spread Spectrum modulation. This has a low data rate, but it’s very reliable; every bit is transmitted as a chirp – a linearly rising radio tone – and the data is encoded in the chirp’s starting frequency. To decode this, the receiver multiplies it with an inverse chirp, then takes a fast Fourier transform, revealing the starting frequency. This process has an equivalent gain of 24 dB, which is enough to let it decode signals even below the receiver’s noise floor.

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Thinking of a Perfect Laptop

    I'm using a Framework 13 as my personal computer now and it’s pretty darn close to what I’d describe as perfect. But there are a some things that I’d change: [...]

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android Police ☛ There's no such thing as stock Android anymore, and that's completely fine

    I'm not talking about the AI or Pixel-exclusive features, but the OS's overall look and feel.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Why smartphones prices are increasing so much

    Most of you have noticed that the prices of smartphones and laptops have been going up. Especially the entry level ones. This is the case wherever you buy your devices from. As Techzim, we sell smartphones to our community and are seeing this first hand.