Category: Network Hacks

Ethernet is how we often network computers together, particularly when they’re too important to leave on a fussy WiFi connection. Have you ever thought about listening to Ethernet signals, though? Well, you totally could, with the NSA selector from [wenzellabs]. The NSA selector is a Eurorack module, designed for use as part of a larger modular […]
Gone are the days when all smart devices were required an internet uplink. The WiFi-enabled IoT fad, while still upon us (no, my coffee scale doesn’t need to be on the network, dammit!) has begun to give way to low-power protocols actually designed for this kind of communication, such as ZigBee, and more recently, Thread. […]
[Jackson Studner] wrote in to let us know about his ESP32-based media server: Jcorp Nomad. This project uses a ESP32-S3 to create a WiFi hotspot you can connect to from your devices. The hotspot is a captive portal which directs the user to a web-interface comprised of static HTML assets which are in situ with […]
Some time last year, a weird thing happened in the hackerspace where this is being written. The Internet was up, and was blisteringly fast as always, but only a few websites worked. What was up? Fortunately with more than one high-end networking specialist on hand it was quickly established that we had a problem with […]
Sometimes a project forms itself around a component rather than an idea, and thus it was that [Maximilien] found himself building a data rate monitor for the connection between two data centers. Some MD0657C2-R LED dot matrix displays for not a lot needed a project. The displays are mounted in groups of four on small […]
Today from the team at Cesanta Software — the people who gave us the open-source Mongoose Web Server Library and Mongoose OS — we have an article covering how to build an STM32 web dashboard. The article runs through setting up a development environment; creating the dashboard layout; implementing the dashboard, devices settings, and firmware […]
Our hacker [Andrew Zonenberg] reports in on his open-source high-speed Ethernet switch. He hasn’t finished yet, but progress has been made. If you were wondering what might be involved in a high-speed Ethernet switch implementation look no further. He’s been working on this project, on and off, since 2012. His design now includes a dizzying […]
Sometimes you need random numbers — and properly random ones, at that. [Sean Boyce] whipped up a rig that serves up just that, tasty random bytes delivered fresh over MQTT. [Sean] tells us he’s been “designing various quantum TRNGs for nearly 15 years as part of an elaborate practical joke” without further explanation. We won’t […]
What do you do when you need to choose an OS at boot but aren’t physically near your machine? [Dakhnod]’s inventive solution is a mix of GRUB, Wake-on-LAN (WOL), and a lightweight ESP8266 running a simple HTTP server. In the past, [dakhnod] already enlightened us with another smart ESP hack. This one’s a clever combination […]
Do they teach networking history classes yet? Or is it still too soon? I was reading [Al]’s first installment of the Forgotten Internet series, on UUCP. The short summary is that it was a system for sending files across computers that were connected, intermittently, by point-to-point phone lines. Each computer knew the phone numbers of […]