gsovereignty on Nostr: 10 years ago I made this prototype board by hand before sending it off for mass ...
10 years ago I made this prototype board by hand before sending it off for mass production.
There are about 300 individual parts soldered onto on this board, the smallest of them are so tiny that I had to build a DIY pic and place thing using an aquarium pump and an insulin syringe.
I reversed the diaphragm in the aquarium pump so it sucked air in instead of pushing it out, and ran a tube through a sealed box so I can turn the pressure on/off with my toe. The negative pressure makes the tiny component stick to the tip of the syringe and when I lift my toe up the negative pressure drops and the syringe lets go of the component.
The trick is to have all 300 parts layed out in some logical sequence so that you can rapidly pick them up and place them on the right spot on the board, if you take longer than about 2 hours the solder paste goes kind of stale, which is fine for simple circuits but not something as sensitive as this board which is RF.
What's the finished device? It's a software defined radio, giving you arbitrary access to send and receive radio from 0-6GHz.
This means that you can prototype new radio protocols and devices in software instead of hardware, making the iteration time an order of magnitude faster.
The most fun I had with this particular board was opening and closing random people's garage doors and watching their reaction, I wrote a script that automagically did replay attacks whenever someone nearby opened a garage door. Most automatic garage door openers become vulnerable to replay attacks after about 6 years when the memory on their rolling code thing starts to overflow. Cars from before 2010 are usually pretty vulnerable too.
Actually scratch that, the most fun I had was setting off all the meal beeper things in a crowded food court and watching 30 people try to collect their meal at the same time. I guess manufactureres should really just stop being lazy and put at least basic security.
Oh wait, actually the most fun I had with this was something related to commercial aircraft that STILL hasn't been patched after 6 years and I'm not going to post publicly.
There are about 300 individual parts soldered onto on this board, the smallest of them are so tiny that I had to build a DIY pic and place thing using an aquarium pump and an insulin syringe.
I reversed the diaphragm in the aquarium pump so it sucked air in instead of pushing it out, and ran a tube through a sealed box so I can turn the pressure on/off with my toe. The negative pressure makes the tiny component stick to the tip of the syringe and when I lift my toe up the negative pressure drops and the syringe lets go of the component.
The trick is to have all 300 parts layed out in some logical sequence so that you can rapidly pick them up and place them on the right spot on the board, if you take longer than about 2 hours the solder paste goes kind of stale, which is fine for simple circuits but not something as sensitive as this board which is RF.
What's the finished device? It's a software defined radio, giving you arbitrary access to send and receive radio from 0-6GHz.
This means that you can prototype new radio protocols and devices in software instead of hardware, making the iteration time an order of magnitude faster.
The most fun I had with this particular board was opening and closing random people's garage doors and watching their reaction, I wrote a script that automagically did replay attacks whenever someone nearby opened a garage door. Most automatic garage door openers become vulnerable to replay attacks after about 6 years when the memory on their rolling code thing starts to overflow. Cars from before 2010 are usually pretty vulnerable too.
Actually scratch that, the most fun I had was setting off all the meal beeper things in a crowded food court and watching 30 people try to collect their meal at the same time. I guess manufactureres should really just stop being lazy and put at least basic security.
Oh wait, actually the most fun I had with this was something related to commercial aircraft that STILL hasn't been patched after 6 years and I'm not going to post publicly.