As a very young child, I used to dream of a tiny computer that could fit in my pocket. It was so tiny that the QWERTY keyboard (which I somehow didn’t have the foresight to imagine a more optimized version of) was operated with a pin. Now we all walk around with computers in our pockets, and while their applications are numerous, they aren’t quite the Swiss Army knife that one might have envisioned they could be, at least when it comes to hacking in the realms of radio frequency (RF), infrared (IR), and USB. A new generation of hacker multitools is emerging, and I’ve been playing with several of them this month. Let’s take a closer look at this evolving scene!

Table of Contents

• Flipper Zero

• CapibaraZero and the LILYGO T-Embed CC1101

• DevKitty and homebrew

Flipper Zero

While various wardriving and other purpose-built tools have existed for some time, it was the 2020 Flipper Zero Kickstarter campaign that really shone a light on this new class of device. Itself inspired by the Pwnagotchi Wi-Fi…urm…”analysis” tool, the Flipper Zero adds a bunch of RF capabilities, an IR transmitter/receiver, USB- C, and for some reason, a surly Tamagotchi-esque dolphin persona to an Arduino-compatible STM32 board, resulting in a highly-capable…uhh…”research” device. I backed the original campaign, and the capabilities and ecosystem (as well as fake videos showing it being used to “hack” all sorts of infeasible targets) have blossomed amazingly since then. The addition of a mobile app and even app store has enabled the community to extend the abilities of the device far beyond the original firmware, and hardware add-ons such as the RP2040-powered Video Game Module provide new superpowers like HDMI DVI-D video out.

CapibaraZero and the LILYGO T-Embed CC1101

If you missed out on the $129 Kickstarter special pricing, or don’t want to shell out $169 for a Flipper Zero today, there’s a rodentine alternative to the popular aquatic mammalian platform, in the form of the open-source CapibaraZero. Based on the ESP32-S3, the project adds buttons, a display, microSD socket, NFC and sub-GHz modules, and an IR emitter/receiver to create a breadboard-based Flipper-alike. The software is still quite young (v0.5.1 at time of writing) but offers a fair amount of functionality, including Wi-Fi and BLE scanning and sniffing, NFC and BadUSB support, and some sub-GHz and IR functionality. I ran into some lockups and other issues while testing, but it’s pretty impressive already, and I can’t wait to see where they take it!

And if you don’t feel like cobbling a bunch of parts together, Lily and Co over at LILYGO have an all-in-one pre-built solution for you. Or at least they will soon: it doesn’t ship until late February, but I was lucky enough to be given one by Lily herself at Maker Faire Shenzhen in November, and I replaced the example firmware with CapibaraZero a few weeks back, and have been using it in the field next to my trusty Flipper. The Capibara/T-Embed combo is not on par with the more mature portable porpoise platform yet, but given that it shares many of the same features, including the nominal CC1101 sub-GHz transceiver, it may only be a matter of time until it catches up!

DevKitty and homebrew

I first met Alex Lynd at Open Hardware Summit 2023 in New York, when I attended his cat-shaped hacking console workshop, during which I managed to pwn my own laptop such that the terminal flashed in a rainbow pattern, though it thankfully went away with a reboot. Alex’s latest cat-tastic tool is the DevKitty CutieCat, which is ESP32-S3-based like CapibaraZero, enabling wholesome activities such as wardriving and USB attacks keyboard emulation. I caught up with Alex recently at Teardown 2024, where he gave a great talk on some extremely creative Wi-Fi…research techniques, for as little as $5! Oh, and speaking of videos, here are some familiar faces hacking on CutieCat’s USB payload functionality and rickrolling themselves!

Here are a bunch of other (often-animalian-themed for some reason?) projects that use various chips and peripherals to accomplish similar features – be sure to give them all a look too and let us know what other multitool projects you find!

I hope you enjoyed my exploration of this emerging new area of making! I’ll see you all again soon in the next newsletter — or maybe on your Wi-Fi network via some of these research tools! 😈

David Groom, definitely not cracking your Wi-Fi password while you read this…

In last week’s newsletter, I talked about the cover illustration for our 20th Anniversary issue. I made a mistake naming the illustrator who is Rob Nance, not Nathan. Rob sent me a photo of some of sketches he did to ideate about the cover image.

Rob explained: “I spent a lot of time doing thumbnail sketches, but they didn't seem to be working until I decided to try and make a giant chain reaction using projects from the past 20 years of Make:, and have elements of those projects spell out Maker.”

Look for the new issue in February.

—Dale

Make Things is a weekly newsletter for the Maker community from Make:. This newsletter lives on the web at makethings.make.co