REUSING PROPRIETARY WIRELESS SOCKETS WITHOUT WIRELESS HACKING

bending different proprietary gadgets to our will is a hacker’s rite of passage. When it concerns proprietary wall sockets, we’d commonly reverse-engineer as well as emulate their protocol – however you can absolutely take a shortcut and, like [oaox], spoof the button presses on the original remote! buttons on such remotes tend to be multiplexed as well as checked out as a essential matrix (provided there’s much more than four of them), so you can’t just pull one of the pads to ground as well as expect to not confuse the microcontroller inside the remote. While reading a essential matrix, the controller will normally drive rows one-by-one as well as checked out column states, as well as a row or column driven externally will result in the code perceiving an entire group of secrets as “pressed” – however, a digitally-driven “switch” doesn’t have this issue!

One method to accomplish this would be to utilize a transistor, however [oaox] played it risk-free as well as went for a 4066 analog multiplexer, which has a higher possibility of working with any type of remote no matter the button configuration, for instance, even when the buttons are wired as part of a resistor network. As a bonus, the remote will still work, as well as you will still be able to utilize its buttons for the original function – as long as you keep your wiring task neat! When compared to reverse-engineering the protocol as well as utilizing a wireless transmitter, this likewise has the benefit of being able to consistently work with even non-realtime gadgets like Raspberry Pi, as well as other gadgets that run an OS as well as aren’t able to assurance consistent operation when driving a affordable GPIO-operated RF transmitter.

In the past, we’ve seen people trying to deal with this precise issue, resorting to RF protocol hacking in the end. We’ve talked about analog multiplexers as well as switches in the past, if you’d like figure out much more methods to apply them to resolve your hacking problems! Taking jobs like these as your starting point, it’s not as well far up until you’re able to replace the drift-y joysticks on your Nintendo switch with touchpads!