Free Stuff, July 2020–September 2020

July 2020

Anna from South Carolina had a lame quarantined birthday in July, so we sent her a present- a GreatFET One. She recently started taking cybersecurity classes and wants to learn about hardware hacking.

Ed from the Suffolk County (NY) Radio Club wrote to us in August to ask for free stuff for learning activities with their new members, mainly scouts and their parents. We sent a bunch of Throwing Star LAN Tap Kits, and hopefully they’ll be able to get together to use them soon.

Axell Macclawd is a security researcher in Brazil. He requested a HackRF One for...

scanlime053 – Active Stylus Teardown

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=WpDrkVLskqk

What’s inside this “active stylus” and how does it work? No spoilers

Thanks to my patrons for making these videos possible.

February Update: Show and Tell

Welcome to this month’s community update. As many of you know, we have now entered the Chinese New Year (CNY) period, which means that all manufacturing and related business activities have ground to a halt. It is always a mad rush to complete ongoing work prior to CNY, but now that the festive period is upon us we get a chance to catch our breath and evaluate the progress made.

scanlime052 – Sewing Servo Mess

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=XTcpJQxLMYE

Finally debugging an old project. It’s a mess but we can work with this.

The end of Community Editions

Today marks the end of the PinePhone Community Edition scheme. On behalf of myself, the Pine Store crew and the entire PINE64 community I’d like to thank the UBports Foundation, the postmarketOS project, Manjaro Linux, KDE e.V as well as the Mobian project for participating in bringing the PinePhone to tens of thousands of FOSS enthusiasts worldwide. We literally couldn’t have done it without you.

scanlime051 – Four Buttons

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=ts8R0ky81bg

In which one button gets four stylish buddies, via forward and reverse engineering. Thanks to my patrons for their continued support.

Hellobox B1 satellite finder teardown

It is a very simple device for about $15. The main SoC is GX6605S. There is some limited info about this chip on C-SKY page and some technical docs at their tools repo. It communicates with a Bluetooth module TLSR8266 using UART. There is also 4MB SPI flash holding the whole bootloader called GxLoader, Linux kernel and filesystem with the main app. The last important chip is RDA5815M which handles the RF to I/Q conversion. In the future I plan to add an USB-to-Ethernet adapter and repurpose it as an cheap opensource SAT>IP server.

Reply: The software of my dreams (3D to 3D capture and world reconstruction)

A reply to Ross Scott's "The Software of my dreams" video, on capturing game 3D worlds so they can be explored in different ways. Includes thoughts on technical and ethical directions, as well as too many game screenshots.

Tube Time Best Of

Since it’s hard to search Twitter, I’ve put together a compilation of some of my best Twitter threads.

Welcome thread #1
Welcome thread #2
Micropodcast Episode 1

Dipped tantalum capacitor (my first cross section)
LMR-195 cable
Fiber optic cable
Undersea cable
Ethernet plug and jack
VGA cable
Type N connector
Type N connector (annotated)
Apple Magsafe connector
DVI single-link cable
Tantalum capacitor from Fluke 8400
BNC plug and jack
Flat phone cable
RIFA paper capacitor
SFP DAC cable
BGA package
USB-C connector
AC power cable
MAX233 chip
Another USB-C cable
Micro SD card
Magsafe 2 connector
DIP socket
Glass thermistor
DIP socket (machine pin)
Carbon composition resistor
Blown LED
Micro-D connector
Modern BGA SoC
MacBook power cable
HDBNC connector
Axial aluminum electrolytic capacitor
12AX7 vacuum tube
Slowly rotating and dramatically lit cutaway view of a 12AX7
12AX7...

Mobian Community Edition

Mobian Community Edition (CE) PinePhones are now available for pre-order in the Pine Store. This edition of the PinePhone ships with Mobian, a Debian-based Linux distribution tailored to run on smartphones. The project came to life on our platform and has now grown to become one of the community favorites.