I will be at Ohayocon this year along with a fellow photographer that owns Moments By Cole. I will post another update hopefully soon.

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Open Source Text Editor: While text editors are all the rage and I know the world does not really need another one. I wrote one that also provide intellisense. I am waiting for official word from my current employer to release this project. This was mainly designed to help speed up coding inside a third-party vendor’s custom scripting language. I can release the editor with out the custom language syntax but it makes no sense as Notepadd++ rocks .

WMI Code Samples: See RFID Spoofer. I have the code I am just trying to turn it into an all-in-one class to make it much more useful. I am trying to provide managed classes for the native WMI. Thinking about that I should check and see if they don’t already exist. I am just writing a code generator to spit out all the properties and options on a WMI class that then generates a .cs file.

HTC Incredible TVOUT for CyanogenMod: See data sharing below. I really need to set up VNC on that virtual machine.

Photography: Seems Route 77 south-bound was closed all day Saturday and I missed the Northcoast Nero event. By the time we would have been able to reroute it was not worth going “it would leave only an hour of daylight left”. We did stop and take photos of some wildlife. I will be posting the photos for sale soon. (Along with a lot of other photos I have been meaning to sell). Also, we will be trying to set up a deal to do a photo shoot at an anime convention next year!

Data Sharing: I really need to get better on this. I am going to set up GIT or Dropbox or something soon and dump all my open source projects into the public. While they will be unfinished and horrible to read, I feel that in case I die, get hit by a bus, or taken by aliens to another planet people will still have access to my data long after. The most valued possession I own is my knowledge and it belongs to the world if not under trade secret agreements. I will also release some “trade” secret code encrypted on the net also and leave the code with some people in case any of the above happens. Do I feel any of this will happen? No, but I check my work into SVN everyday before I leave work. I should do it with my projects.

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Cyanogen Mod TV out: Really sorry this got moved to the back burner. I really need to set up remote access to my Linux machines. It’s been a little of a learning curve to learn the framework as it does differ from Linux a bit.

Sports Car: Left bank lean! The problem was with the MAF sensor and now the car is back to zipping around. I am remounting and doing a lot of the electrical work. I switched out the 100 amp glass fuse for a 100 amp breaker. The problem is that I need a case for the breaker. I refuse to place any bare positive charged bolts/wire in an area where they are not protected from a rogue bolt failing and grounding the car out. The battery would of course explode. I had the codes ran at Autozone last weekend and they said the problem is the left bank o2 sensor. I will order a new o2 spacer off Ebay, as it must not have been spaced enough.

Webservers: We have almost moved all the websites to a new host: Media Temple. My only complaint to this date is the fact you have to log in to respond to a ticket and you can’t e-mail them back. I was at Kirtland Ohio Wine Festival, and I needed to send a simple “That’s cool” reply. Since I never updated my Keepass file on my phone before I left, I couldn’t login to the support site to send a reply message. Of course I could have tunneled through 4-5 systems to get access to send the message, but it was hot, and I had been drinking and lacked a bluetooth keyboard.

Coding Competition! Seems work likes my mad coding skillz (was that hacker eliter speak?). In September, we are competing to see who can send out e-mails the fastest using a third-party system. I don’t want to give away any details as we are competing against some hard hitters. I don’t know if my current company fully knows who I have worked for; but I am not scared, and I will take first . I know, big talk — I will probably oversleep or something and lose.

New Content: I have been working really hard to provide some really good nerd content. I failed at a video of how to solder thick gauge wire only to have it work when I was not being filmed. I am also constantly rewriting an article on thinking like a hacker.

RFID Giveaway!!!! I will be giving away a few RFID Spoofers when I have the boards printed. I am going to try to team up with Hack a Day for the giveaway.

Also, thanks to everyone for reminding me I am a year older now.

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Background:
Originally I wanted to “spoof” RFID chips from my phone. After much looking into, even if I used ultra small parts, adding a spoofer into my phone became a little unrealistic. The best option turned out to be to solder a transistor to the headphone output jack and use pulse-width modulation to short the tuned circuit (lc) circuit. I wasn’t too keen on possible interference to my headphone jack. The other option was to fit the circuit into a 1/8 headphone jack, but then I would have something sticking out, and that wouldn’t be cool!

Phase 1:
I first used a simple RFID reader circuit I got for 10 bucks but found I was unable to read my work RFID card. After some looking around for better readers that support FSK and not just ASK, I came across a wonderful little circuit by Beth Scott. This used the propeller with a few extra parts. What I really liked about the design is the built-in tuner. The circuit looks like an inductor sensor with an attached LC. After building this and two failed coils I changed some of the capacitors around and lowered the mH of the inductor. This allowed me to complete 3 coils: 6 inch, 4inch, and 2 inch. Now I could read the cards!

Phase 2:
Still I needed to replay the payload. As luck would have it, Beth Scott released an awesome RFID tag using an Attiny85. While I could shrink her design down to be almost no bigger than the chip itself, the problem was how to reprogram it on the fly. Without finding any good answers or none that looked pretty phase 3 came in.

Phase 3:
With the reader outputting over a serial connection to my computer it was not very portable. At first I was going to use a simple 2 line character LCD that was lying around. To make sure I could really shrink Beth’s RFID tag down to the size of the chip, I needed an AVR programmer. Enter another nerd nip favorite of mine. Lady Ada owns a cool little site with all kinds of goodies at www.adafruit.com. While looking for an AVR programmer (I bought the AVRTinsy kit). I remembered the Nokia LCD screens are hacker approved. That completed my order from Ada Fruit. After getting the screen I was like hrmm…………….I bet I can make this whole circuit board with reader/spoofer fit on the back of the LCD! After some designs and a few test prints on paper, I was right: I could fit all the parts on the back of the LCD screen.

Phase 4:
With a lot of over-powered goodness I decided to remove some extra bloat from my wallet. I started to write a bar code library to draw my bar codes on the Nokia 5110 screen so I can ditch the plastic cards. I thought HEY! Why not add a bar code reader also and make this really awesome. Well, the circuit was just a little too big, and really, reading bar codes on the fly is something you do once. So, I created a bar code reader daughter board for the overall project.

About the Current Circuit:
The other night via Twitter I posted to @scanlime a sample schematic (Shown below). On the left side is the power supply with a green diode to let you know it’s on. The main center square is all the parts for the propeller chip (Memory, prop plug port, 5mhz crystal, and the propeller chip). Below that is a simple LC with a transistor to short on the circuit at the right times. Top right is the Nokia 5110 header. Below the Nokia 5110 Header is Beth Scott’s reader design. Missing additions to her design is two solid-state relays. These relays are made to shut off the inductor coil when the device is “spoof” mode. I am going to add 1mb-8mb of memory on board for storing the screen art, RFID tags, and bar codes. I think I have some Microchip flash memory some place that I will probably use. The memory will auto store via the readers or can be accessed via the prop plug’s serial connection. Two buttons below the LCD will change from reader to spoofer. On the side of the LCD will be an up and down buttons to scroll through a list RFID and bar codes. The PCB (once its been tested), will be made all open source goodness, and you will be able to order a print from http://batchpcb.com/ of course for free. I have no interest in selling circuits or parts. If it becomes popular, you can bug the lovely Lady Ada, and maybe she will sell a kit on her site. I also plan to make a home-brew friendly through-hole design that will be laser-printer friendly and single-sided. Attached below are some photos!

Links
Scanlime – Beth Scott
Lady Ada
Ada Fruit

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I should also note that I really need to lose weight after seeing my self in that video….

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