TL;DR: 325x256 30fps Automotive Thermal Camera can be hacked to run on a Raspberry Pi+FPGA.
Expectations This post is about a teardown of an DPO5000 oscilloscope (DPO5034). This is a 2011, mid-range, Windows-based Tektronix oscilloscope. List price is $12.000, but eBay has them - used - down to $5500 or so if you're lucky. This particular model is a 350MHz, 5Gs/s model without MSO functionality (adding 16 digital channels, a "poor man's logic analyzer" -even though it rather *makes* you poor when buying it, since it's pretty expensive).
I love physics hacks, and I consider phase shift measurements in general as a great hack. As a consequence, I love laser distance meters.
A while ago I took apart a Fluke 411D - coincidentally with nearly identical results as this SparkFun tutorial: I disassembled it, found the serial port, found the “?\r\n”, tried sending all kind of data to the other “RX” pins - and didn’t receive any answer from the device.
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I recently bought a Metz 50 AF-1 N flash that I’m very happy with. One of the reason why I bought this one was that it has a USB port to upgrade the firmware. (Call me crazy, but that’s a valid reason for me.)
Looking at their firmware, we find a number of “.mtz” files that all look - weird. Their entropy is much too low for a real encryption scheme (plus they don’t seem to have any length alignment).
8 ports should be enough for everyone - but 24 ports are so much cooler. The more, the better. I’ve decided again for minimum investment - 68 EUR for 24 bidirectional Gigabit isn’t that bad. It’s a TP-Link L-SG1024.
So I’ve ripped it open (you expected that, right?).
To make a long story short: This switch isn’t hackable. It uses a Marvell Prestera-DX switch (with external QPHYs), and this is a strictly unmanaged switch solution.
I was looking for a successor to my last project. Some time ago I’ve bought the most cheapest Gigabit-Ethernet switch I could find. It was a TP-Link TL-SG1008D - 8 ports, GigE on all of them, and in the end, it was much bulkier than I expected it from the photo.
It served well, and I finally decided to open it up.
Turns out that the heat sink is pretty much damn massively soldered into the PCB.
I’ve bought a HDMI Audio Splitter from dealextreme. I’ve ripped it open.
The thing has two HDMI inputs, one HDMI output. So far it’s boring - most of these devices just use analog switches to route the HDMI. However, this thing also has a coaxial and optical SPDIF output. That means it must at least being able to parse the HDMI stream, potentially decrypt it (if HDCP is used), and extract the audio information.
From time to time, I’ll rip apart devices just because I want to know what’s inside. I mean, usually you know what’s inside - but sometimes, there’s more. Those are the happy days. Sometimes, it’s just a tiny PCB and a lot of weight. Those are the not so happy days.
I’ll start this series - which hopefully evolves a bit more than the last series I’ve started here (which I still intend to finish… some day) - with the Tektronix TPA-BNC.