• Gsm Modem Hacking

Today, there are dozens of off-the-shelf solutions for a GPS tracking device. Most of them use GSM, some of them use satellites, and all of them are astonishingly inexpensive.

If you want to track a car, dog, or your luggage, you’ve never had more options. Emilio wanted to track his own car, and the original solution for this was a smartphone. This smartphone was also a good choice, as it’s a programmable GPS device connected to a cell network, but there had to be a simpler solution. (Google Translatrix ). The rest of the hardware is an ATMega48V Emilio had sitting around and a 2500 mAh lithium cell. It’s a cellular tracker make out of eleven euro’s worth of hardware and some junk in a drawer. There are only a few caveats to this hardware.

First, the ATmega48V only has one UART. This is connected to the GPS module at 9600, 8N1. The connection to the GSM M-590 module is only 2400 bps, and slow enough for a bitbanged UART.

This hardware is soldered to a piece of perfboard, thus ending the hardware part of this build. The software is a little more complex, but not by very much. The GPS part of the firmware records the current latitude and longitude. If the GSM module receives a call, it replies with an SMS of the current GPS coordinates and a few GPS coordinates seen earlier. Of course, a pre-paid SIM is required for this build, but those are cheap enough. Not even ten years ago, a simple, DIY GPS tracker would have cost a small fortune. Now that we have cheap GPS modules, GSM modules, and more magical electronics from the East, builds like this are easy and cheap.

What a magical time to be alive. Posted in Tagged,. If you’ve spent much time tinkering with electronics, you’ve probably heard of Seeedstudio from their development boards, tools, and their PCB fabrication service. Their latest Kickstarter venture is that will allow hackers to put together a phone by blending GSM modules, batteries, screens, and other stock units, including an Arduino-based processing core, GPS, NFC, and other building blocks.

The funding campaign has already exceeded its goal and delivery is scheduled for next year with a basic kit weighing in at a projected $59, according to Seeed. Presumably, the core phone module will have regulatory acceptance, but the other ancillary modules won’t require as rigorous testing and certification. What would you do with an inexpensive, embeddable cell phone? The modules are tiny, so you could implant them in lots of places. Some of Seeed’s more interesting ideas include building a phone into a walking stick, a dog collar, or a kite (although we were thinking quadcopters). Of course, we’ve seen before.

Difficult to imagine sticking those in a dog collar, though, unless you have a fairly large dog. If you are a fan of 1960’s TV, it is easy to imagine or a working Star Trek communicator. Posted in, Tagged,. As laptops have become smaller and easy to carry around, they have also picked up the most unfortunate property of being easy to steal. We’ve read the stories of how some victims are able to track them down via webcam still images of the thief. Mastro Gippo decided to take it one step further and to his laptop. The idea is if the laptop becomes unrecoverable, it will become useless and any sensitive data will be destroyed without harming the area around it.

It’s somewhat inception like, as it’s a hack within a hack. It’s based on the, a CAN bus reverse engineering tool equipped with GPS and a SIM800 GSM module, which was also developed by Mastro Gippo. The idea is to tuck the small board somewhere in the laptop and wire it up between the battery and some sensitive parts.

Send a single SMS text and ‘poof’, bye-bye laptop. He wrote all the code in less the 24 hours for the BattleHack Hackathon.

He decided to spice up the act with some firecrackers and a detonator, which made his team the crowd favorite and earned a victory. Posted in Tagged,. For Tyler’s entry to the Hackaday Prize, he’s making something that just a few years ago would be unheard of in a homebrew build. Yes, with cheap single-board Linux computers, GSM modules, and SPI touchscreen displays, it’s possible to build your own smartphone. Inside Tyler’s DIY smartphone is a Raspberry Pi Model A, a 3.5 inch touchscreen PiTFT with 480×320 resolution, and an The connections are simple enough; the TFT is connected over SPI, and the GSM module over serial. The entire device is powered by a 1200mAh LiIon battery, charged with a powerboost board, runs capable of making calls, sending texts, and takes pictures with a Pi camera. This is not what you would normally call a smartphone.

The FONA module is 2G only, meaning you’re limited to 2G speeds and 2G networks. AT&T will be shutting down 2G networks in a little bit, although T-Mobile will be keeping them up for anyone who still has an old Nokia Brick. That said, Tyler’s phone is still exactly what you want in a minimal phone: it just makes calls and receives texts, it has a camera, and unlike the Nokia, you can take it apart and repair it easily.

Not that you ever had to do that with a Nokia Posted in, Tagged,. It’s happened. It’s finally happened. In a move that has hipsters donning their good flannel and breaking out that case of Genesee they were saving for a special occasion,.

Jaromir created this astonishingly retro future device as an entry for the, a contest to do the most with an ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller in an 8-pin package. Having only six I/O pins for controlling a GSM module, display a few buttons, and the fancy rotary dial meant Jaromir needed to expand his I/O some way. He chose a shift register to handle the buttons and display in a somewhat impressive demonstration of using a shift register as both an input and output expander at the same time. From the videos Jaromir uploaded, the rotary cell phone isn’t ready for Think Geek to do a production run quite yet. He needs to enter the PIN for the SIM card, AT commands for the GSM module, and is, of course, a horrible method of user input for the younglings who have only seen rotary phones in old movies. That being said, it’s a rotary cell phone running on an 8-pin microcontroller.

What more do you want? Videos of this awesome this truly awesome phone in action below. If you’d like to build your own – and why wouldn’t you – all the files are available Posted in, Tagged,. Have you ever dreamed of independence from smartphone bloatware? If you have a Raspberry Pi and an Adafruit TFT, you’re halfway to making your own version of. This tasty proof-of-concept cellular sandwich is made by adding a, which communicates via UART, to the Pi/TFT hardware while using a piece of foam core board in the middle to prevent shorts.

You won’t get free service or anything, but you can pop a pre-paid SIM card into it. He’s powering it with a and using a DC-to-DC converter to set up the 3.7V to 5V. You could do a lot worse than the $158 BOM, and we’re betting you have a Pi lying around already.

We wish more phones had baby rocker switches. There’s a slight problem with the PiPhone: it gets pretty warm and there isn’t a lot of room for air circulation. For best results, let it cool on a well-attended windowsill or operate it near a fan like Dave did. He doesn’t have the code up on GitHub as of this writing, but he will capitulate to high demand.

Make the jump to see Dave’s tour of the PiPhone and watch him make a call with it. Posted in, Tagged,. Since our ‘ol buddy Caleb left Hackaday for EE Times, he’s been very busy.

One of his latest projects. This time around it’s a 1953 Heathkit Grid Dip Meter. It’s a beautiful piece of engineering with Point to Point wiring and metal gears. We love microcontroller breakout boards, and so does Tim apparently. He built a breadboard friendly. It’s an ARM Cortex M0+ with 16kb of Flash and 4kb of SRAM. The entire breakout board is smaller than.

When are we going to see these on Tindie, Tim? With the board files. You can also pick up a board at – $3.30 for a set of three.

What do you do when you have the perfect idea for a Kickstarter, but don’t have the funds for the perfect sales pitch? Unfortunately, this campaign has already been successfully funded, so it’s already too late to get in on the ground floor. We’ve seen but now it’s.

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David at the MIT Media Lab has been working on a bare-bones, ATMega & GSM module phone for a while now, and now you can grab the firmware and board files. Make your own cell phone! Here comes Hanukkah, so drink your gin and tonica. So put on your yarmulke, it’s time to celebrate Hanukkah.

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3G Modems Cruising Info Equipment Pages 3G Modems What are 3G Modems? Practically, speaking, they allow you to get broadband internet access anywhere you can get a cell-phone signal!

This, of course, is virtually anywhere on land these days and even out to sea about 15 miles or so (and further with special antennas). For the purposes of this article, we refer to '3G' in the generic to refer to this type of technology, even though 4G & higher speeds are now becoming available. OK, it doesn't let you update your webpage from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but it's still pretty cool. How often are you in the middle of an ocean? Historically, we're on passage about 7% of the days we're on board. We generally have a cell signal the other 93% of the time. GSM is the cell-phone technology that's currently used all over the world.

Most countries have a GSM network, even remote ones like, Nepal Telecom, Celcom (Malaysia), AIS (Thailand) & Telkom Kenya. It's not as popular in the USA but it's growing even there (although the US uses slightly different frequencies for its version of GSM, so a GSM phone or modem from the US may not work in other countries unless it's a special tri- or quad-band unit). 3G is a technology that piggy-backs on the GSM cell signals, providing broadband internet access wherever cell signals are available. Many GSM phones these days have 3G modems built into them, and many allow 'tethering' so your computer can get internet access using the phone's data signal. We first heard of this technology when we were in Brisbane in 2006.

Summer in Brisbane is a time of intense thunderstorms, which sailboats don't like at all. Even a nearby lightning strike can destroy many of the sensitive electronics that we carry on board (we lost over $4,000 from a near miss). But the Brisbane airport radar can see these thunderstorms and publishes graphics of them on the internet every minute or so. They'll even show their tracks over the last several minutes, so us cruisers can see if the storms are headed towards us or away. But we didn't actually buy a 3G modem until we got to South Africa, paying R1,700 (about $240) for a unit that (we later found) was locked to the Vodacom system. Still, Vodacom and its affiliates cover much of the world. And prices now (late 2011) are only about $30 for an unlocked 3G modem here in Malaysia (and even better if you can catch a promotion).

Connect time is expensive in South Africa, so we had to pay an additional $45 for 2 gigabytes (GB) of data, which lasted us about 2 months if we were careful (but now connect time is much cheaper). In Malaysia, Celcom (which is affiliated with Vodacom) charges about $6/week for 2GB of data, and in the Seychelles, the service is provided for free (or perhaps they hadn't worked out a way to charge for it yet). Physically, a 3G modem looks a bit like an external WiFi unit - about the size of 1-2 fingers, with a USB tail to plug into the computer. Most units have a light that changes color to indicate your connection speed. To the computer, most units look like a flash-memory ('nerd') stick, and most carry all their software in that flash memory, requiring no additional installation software and providing a complicated but plug-&-play software installation.

Even in Africa, our modem provided us with excellent service. We could be in a rest-camp in Kruger Park, outside our primitive safari-tent, and still be online, while the hyena on the other side of the fence contemplated us, wondering what we'd taste like. Friends of ours were sailing down the coast of South Africa in thick fog, wanting to come into Knysna but afraid to approach the coast and the narrow 'Knysna Heads' entrance in the fog. But they were only 5 miles offshore and they had a cell signal, so they checked into. That site has 2 webcams pointed at the Knysna entrance. No fog, and no swells!

So our friends turned towards shore, soon sailed out of the fog, and made a successful landfall at Knysna. GSM works on 2 frequencies, one usually close to 2 GHz and the other about half that. Like any other radio, a 3G modem will work better if it has a reasonably unobstructed view of a cell tower, and if the antennas are oriented in the same direction.

We tend to hang ours up with a string to a hatch or something. Cruisers with metal boats may want to invest in a USB extension cord so they can hang their 3G modem outside their boat, where the metal hull won't obstruct the signal. For cruisers in Thailand, Thailand is now (2012) rolling out 3G in selected areas, but we found that our Malaysian modem would only get the old EDGE (2.5G) speeds. We needed a new modem to get the new 3G speeds. For about $30/month you could get a plan for more or less unlimited data. For cruisers in South Africa (and some other countries) there are some tricks to getting the most out of your 3G modem.

First, you don't want to use normal airtime for your data - you'll go through it in no time at all. Instead, convert all of the airtime on your modem into 'data‑bundles'. Since the Vodacom system is designed to start using airtime as soon as you run out of data‑bundles, you generally don't want to have any normal airtime on your modem, just data‑bundles. When we were there in 2008 and 2009, data‑bundles cost R189, R289, or R389 ($27, $41, & $55) for 500MB, 1GB, or 2GB respectively. Obviously, buying 2GB is the best deal, but it only lasted until the end of the next month, so you had to gauge how much you'd use. Unfortunately, you can't buy airtime in those amounts! So the trick is to buy somewhat more than that amount of airtime, put it on your normal cell‑phone, and then transfer over the exact amount you need to your modem by dialing.111# (send) and following the prompts for airtime transfer.

The call is free, but remember to hit your 'Select' button before typing the number of your response, or you'll have to start all over again. Then you'll have to remove the SIM from your phone and put in your modem's SIM. You should get a message that you've been topped up by the amount that you just transferred.

Gsm Modem Hacking

Then dial.111# (send) again to convert your transferred airtime into data‑bundles right away. When you're finished, including both confirmation steps, remove your data SIM, put it back in your modem, and replace your phone's normal SIM. You'll have to repeat this whole procedure every month or 2 when your data-bundles run out. Strangely enough, the software did not allow us to add more data‑bundles until all of our existing data‑bundles had expired or been used up. This means that you have to be in the middle of a data download and have it fail before you can top up, a truly stupid way to work things. But as they say, TIA ( This Is Africa.) Equipment Pages: 3G Modems Cruising Info: Top Level: If our information is useful, you can help by making a donation © 2000‑2017 Contact: - HackingFamily.com, svOcelot.com.