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Open source hardware? Schematic?


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Irrespective of when official expansion boards are available, I'd still like to see some documentation on the expansion bus, hear about any gotchas and caveats around using the pins, etc.

The closed and secretive nature around the expansion bus doesn't really seem to be in the hacker / Hak5 spirit!

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Irrespective of when official expansion boards are available, I'd still like to see some documentation on the expansion bus, hear about any gotchas and caveats around using the pins, etc.

The closed and secretive nature around the expansion bus doesn't really seem to be in the hacker / Hak5 spirit!

Agree.

PenturaLabs did some analysis: http://penturalabs.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/naked-wifi-pineapple-mark-v/

I haven't had time to do some research myself but I guess it is fairly straight-forward to use the GPIO pins since the packages are already there.

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Yeah - I saw that. Taking a quick look at the AR9331 spec / pinout I think we have 6 GPIOs that are usable (3 might be used for JTAG / serial - hence less than the 9 you'd guess from looking at the PCB).

I'm thinking of knocking together an expansion board with a buzzer, LED and two tactile switches leaving 2 pins free to bitbang an I2C HD44780 LCD (and open source the hardware schematics / design of course!).

Edited by Oli
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I had asked about the expansion port SDK and information a while ago. Seb replied and said that info will be available soon. Here is the link to the forum post.

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Meh, guess I'll just have to fire up the soldering iron this weekend then. The hardware bug means I need another unit in the future anyway. After my ducky broke I built an alternative that was an order of magnitude better (keyboard LEDs, dips, neopixel indicators, tactile switches, LED data transfer protocol, buzzer, etc) and if Hak5 thinks it can behave like Microsoft I'm more than willing to have a crack at an alternative Wifi pineapple hardware too! :)

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A low res sneak peek is attached. No time to write up yet.

Features:

  • SD Card (w/ mass storage device functionality)
  • Keyboard LEDs (caps lock, scroll lock, num lock - or user definable)
  • 3WAY DIP
  • 3 x Tactile Switches
  • Buzzer
  • I2C bus - currently used for OLED breakout (debug messages, exfiltrated password display)
  • 1 built in Neopixel RGB notification LED + header to chain as many as needed (using Neopixel stick as a breakout)
  • Keyboard LED data transfer protocol
  • A "real" programming language!

It has a pretty small footprint and endless customization options :)

post-45337-0-19993900-1400179918_thumb.p

Edited by Oli
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Meh, guess I'll just have to fire up the soldering iron this weekend then. The hardware bug means I need another unit in the future anyway. After my ducky broke I built an alternative that was an order of magnitude better (keyboard LEDs, dips, neopixel indicators, tactile switches, LED data transfer protocol, buzzer, etc) and if Hak5 thinks it can behave like Microsoft I'm more than willing to have a crack at an alternative Wifi pineapple hardware too! :)

We aren't trying to be Microsoft. We are just not ready with the HDK yet. Personally, I am the software guy - I have very little to do with the Hardware, so I cannot tell you much. However, we have planned to release an HDK / modules for the WiFi Pineapple MKV by / around Defcon. We are a tiny team and are simply not done with the development of the hardware additions yet.

I'll see if I can get the appropriate people for details in here though.

Best Regards,

Sebkinne

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Once my personal life has settled down a bit, presumably somewhere near august, I'll have some time to help you out with development. Any thoughts on how I can do so?

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Is the Mark V hardware open source? Is a schematic available? Would be helpful for developing hardware to connect to the breakout pins.

Unfortunately due to NDAs that must be signed with some of the vendors (like Atheros and Realtek) it can't be true open hardware - however a schematic should be totally doable. I'll see what I can get together from our hardware guy.

Irrespective of when official expansion boards are available, I'd still like to see some documentation on the expansion bus, hear about any gotchas and caveats around using the pins, etc.

The closed and secretive nature around the expansion bus doesn't really seem to be in the hacker / Hak5 spirit!

Sorry if it seemed like it's secretive - it's not it's simply that I don't have the information else I'd be publishing it here. From what I understand from our engineer the expansion pins are rather sensitive and operate in a sort of non-standard way. We really won't want anyone bricking things because they hooked a 3.3v TTL or something to it. I'll see what I can get leading up to the official HDK release.

A low res sneak peek is attached. No time to write up yet.

Features:

  • SD Card (w/ mass storage device functionality)
  • Keyboard LEDs (caps lock, scroll lock, num lock - or user definable)
  • 3WAY DIP
  • 3 x Tactile Switches
  • Buzzer
  • I2C bus - currently used for OLED breakout (debug messages, exfiltrated password display)
  • 1 built in Neopixel RGB notification LED + header to chain as many as needed (using Neopixel stick as a breakout)
  • Keyboard LED data transfer protocol
  • A "real" programming language!

It has a pretty small footprint and endless customization options :)

That's some formidable kit! I love the I2C bus. Congrats. What's the language?

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We're putting in a request with Qualcomm legal to release the pinout proper as well as continuing work on our API which will allow you to interface with the pins from our openwrt build. As soon as we have something workable well release the code/docs with the hardware to follow.

Interesting reading over at https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=36471&p=1

Edited for compliance.

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Out of curiosity, who's the one under NDA? You, the hardware guy, the manufacturer or all of the above?

We could piss and moan about the vendor being a dick and everything being better off when stuff is open and transparant and yadda yadda yadda. Bottom line is you guys took a number of parts from a vendor and made them into a very good product that goes beyond the sum of its components. If the pinouts get released, the product simply gets even better. Great if it happens, if not... well, at least people looking for that will know they'll need to look elsewhere.

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Thanks Darren - it is using Arduino and i'm using Python and jinja templates to generate payloads.

Looks like the expansion bus is all pretty standard gpio outputs but running at non-standard 2.5v logic levels. A logic level shifter with a voltage bridge to get the 2.5v from the 3.3v pin (for the VL reference) would probably get around this.

There isn't an SPI or I2C (or serial, as far as I can tell) on the expansion bus. For the Arduino Yun, the AR9331 is communicated with using the hardware serial, I think. I wonder how official expansion boards will work? Presumably bit banging or connecting to the serial rather than expansion bus? Hopefully the expansion boards won't tie up the only serial on the AR9331!

Edited by Oli
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Thanks Darren - it is using Arduino and i'm using Python and jinja templates to generate payloads.

Looks like the expansion bus is all pretty standard gpio outputs but running at non-standard 2.5v logic levels. A logic level shifter with a voltage bridge to get the 2.5v from the 3.3v pin (for the VL reference) would probably get around this.

There isn't an SPI or I2C (or serial, as far as I can tell) on the expansion bus. For the Arduino Yun, the AR9331 is communicated with using the hardware serial, I think. I wonder how official expansion boards will work? Presumably bit banging or connecting to the serial rather than expansion bus? Hopefully the expansion boards won't tie up the only serial on the AR9331!

Actually it's lower than 2.5v from what I understand. I'll have more details on SPI/I2C when our engineer gets back to me with the code. It should be nearly as straight forward to speak to in openwrt as, say, the LEDs.

FWIW, I was able to find the datasheet for the ar9331 on google in less than a second. So much for being 'confidential'. :grin:

FWIW, I was able to find the torrent for Spiderman 3 on Google in less than a second. So much for being 'copyrighted'. :lol:

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The additional parts that I needed have been sourced so I'm looking forward to voiding my MKV warranty over the 3 day weekend! I'll get my scope out and figure out the correct voltage levels etc - fingers crossed I don't brick the thing :unsure:

What do you think would be some killer addons for the pineapple? I'm thinking buzzer, leds, tactile switches, DIP switches, teensy and an OLED screen would be awesome. Anything else obvious that I have missed?

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The additional parts that I needed have been sourced so I'm looking forward to voiding my MKV warranty over the 3 day weekend! I'll get my scope out and figure out the correct voltage levels etc - fingers crossed I don't brick the thing :unsure:

What do you think would be some killer addons for the pineapple? I'm thinking buzzer, leds, tactile switches, DIP switches, teensy and an OLED screen would be awesome. Anything else obvious that I have missed?

IIRC 1.8v. Let us know how your tinkering goes and feel free to reach out to me directly (email is best) if there's anything else we can help with pre-HDK. Cheers!

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OK, so I managed to hack the expansion bus - I couldn't be bothered waiting until DefCon! :grin:

It was running at 2.5V not 1.8V for the GPIO. I had purchased some caps and 1.8V regulators after Darren's previous post - I guess I'll have to save them for another project!

I have tactile switches (i.e. buttons) and LEDs working great on the expansion bus (on my prototype board I have 3x tactile switches and 2x LEDs wired up). I've got 4 logic level shifted gpio pins set up and so the next step is to interface with arduino and add an LCD / OLED display (probably bit banging I2C).

There are some cool projects that I have in mind now that I have access to the expansion bus! Should be fairly easy to hook the Pineapple up to a Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, etc. When I have everything up and running I will document what I have done, if there is enough interest.

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