miniPCI-e dual USB card extender

Recently, I was looking for an affordable LoRaWAN gateway with 3G/LTE connectivity. I like Mikrotik products because they are easy to use and have many features (e.g. Wireguard VPN ) . I found RBwAPR-2nD which has a miniPCI-e slot which can be fitted with R11e-LR8 LoRaWAN gateway module or a card for mobile network connectivity (e.g. R11e-4G). The problem is you cannot have both because there is only one slot. Or can you?

As soon as I verified that LR8 use only USB connectivity through miniPCIe I’ve got an idea why couldn’t we fit in a USB hub to...

Getting Hired at Great Scott Gadgets

Once in a while, we get emails from people in the community who want to know what they can do to increase their chances of getting hired at Great Scott Gadgets (GSG) when we do happen to open up a position. We really appreciate this enthusiasm! Below we outline some of the skills and topics we assess when hiring someone to join our small, completely-remote team.

Know our products and projects. Our products are listed on our website. The Software and hardware details for our products and projects are in the repositories on our GitHub. When we interview we ask which...

Ubertooth Retirement

After 12 years and 17 production runs, Great Scott Gadgets is retiring our first product, Ubertooth One, from our hardware catalog.

GSG’s founder Michael Ossmann designed Ubertooth One because he wanted a device that could detect and monitor Bluetooth. At the time, such instruments existed but cost at least five figures—prohibitively expensive for most security researchers. His goal was to design an open-source, affordable-to-make tool that anyone in the security community with basic soldering skills could assemble. At the project’s inception, his intent was not to sell hardware but to provide a solution to a problem that no one else had...

Moving emails accounts to a new host, imapcopy with actual encryption

Tunnelling Imapcopy traffic over TLS and everything that went wrong for me.

Free Stuff - November 2022

The November recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Alex of the CCCSBG Hackerspace. A group of people at the CCCSBG Hackerspace are making an effort to explore the protocol spoken between ancient IBM3270 terminal equipment and their controller. Alex points out that Andrew Kay has done similar work for text-only traffic [1], but mentions that his hackerspace wants to chip away at the graphics capabilities of the IBM 3270. We have sent Alex and CCCSBG a GreatFET One so they can sniff the traffic that is going through the NS DP8340 and NS DP8341 chips on...

HackRF One Shortage

The past couple of years have been challenging for Great Scott Gadgets. The global chip shortage in particular has put demands on our team unlike anything we’ve faced in the past, and we have been working hard to navigate its effects on our supply chain for HackRF One and our other products. Revenue from the sale of hardware sustains our business, allows us to improve our existing products, and helps us to continue the research and development work that brings new and innovative open source tools to the community. If you have tried to purchase a HackRF One recently, you...

Social Media Update

Find my latest posts at Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/tubetime.bsky.social). I’ve also been active since 2022 on Mastodon as @tubetime@mastodon.social.

December Update: Merry Christmas and Happy New PineTab

Merry Christmas, happy holidays and a Happy New Year to you all. This month’s update has a different formula from the usual - aside from the announcement of the PineTab2, most of this month’s content is dedicated to looking back at this year and taking a sneak peak at what’s to come in 2023. I think that if you read between the lines, even poorly, you’ll get a good idea of what we’ll be up to next year.  

RetroNetCall: "ISDN B-Channel protocols"

I've presented about ISDN B-Channel protocols (X.75, V.120, V.110, T.70, ...) as part of the RetroNetCall talk series on retro-networking technology.

You can find the video recording at https://media.ccc.de/v/retronetcall-20221207-laforge-isdn-b-channel-protocols

Many people with some kind of telecom background are familiar with D-channel (signalling) protocols of ISDN, and you can find many publications on that topic. Surprisingly, much less publications are talking about the B-channel protocols used for data transmission, like VX.75, V.110, V.120, T.70, ...

A Christmas tree bauble that plays Doom

Now you can shoot zombies and imps on your Christmas tree as well.