Adventures in Tech

This is a follow-up post to my first post about a DIY fingerprint reader . I wanted something smaller, small enough to put on a key chain. In my previous post, I said I was going to try to cram one of my extra laptop fingerprint readers into a dead thumb drive. As it turns out, I had another device just that's slightly larger and fits the reader better. The devices I was digging through a drawer of stuff and came across a USB 3G modem. Being slightly larger than a thumb drive, the housing of the device is better suited to the fingerprint reader I purchased. USB 3G Modem (Huawei EC1260) Fingerprint Reader (Lenovo X60/X60S fingerprint reader) This is the same device as the one that I used when I put a fingerprint reader in a USB hub, so everything I learned there carried over. One word of warning with this fingerprint reader is that the order of the data lines is swapped. Viewing from the front, the traces coming out in the connector are ordered from left to right as f...

Introduction If you've ever bricked a router with a bad firmware update and had to reload the firmware over a serial connection, then you may be familiar with much of what I cover here. If you don't even know what firmware is, this post is probably not for you. If you know what firmware is but don't know what I'm talking about with serial connections, keep reading; you may find this interesting. In my particular case, I did not brick a router. The router in question was working exactly as intended by the manufacturer. No, I wanted to put custom firmware on it, and the manufacturer had locked the device down to prevent such modifications. That didn't stop others from exploiting a security hole in the parental control pages to run arbitrary code. Alas, my router had been upgraded with a version of firmware that patched that gaping hole. In addition to these complications, I didn't have the custom firmware file that I needed for flashing. You see, the fi...

The Project Fingerprint readers are not the best form of security out there. Your fingerprints are literally everywhere. I wasn't going to let that stop me though. I've never had a computer with a fingerprint scanner on it, and I've always been too cheap to buy one. Then I saw a post on hackaday mentioning that many of the fingerprint scanners in laptops are USB devices. Surely, I could make my own, I thought. Let me apologize now for not taking pictures as I put this little project together. I looked up replacement fingerprint readers on taobao.com (I live in China), and found some. The only other thing I needed was a USB chord to connect to it. Then I realized I had something better, a 4-port USB hub. Parts (approx. $5) ThinkPad X60/X60S fingerprint scanner 1x Lenovo ThinkPad X60/X60S fingerprint scanner 1x 4-port USB hub I ordered four of the fingerprint readers from taobao (link may not open outside China) for 30RMB, including delivery. The USB hu...