Dec 27, 2024

Raven Smartwatch - Hardware — GitHub profile raven-hardware repository schematic pdf parts spreadsheet Hardware This is the third post regarding my current project, the Raven smartwatch. In this post, I will be discussing the general hardware design and choices, as well as the lower-level aspects of the hardware. Initial choices Overall, my main driving aspects of the hardware were to only use necessary components, removing unused or unnecessary components for a project like this(ex: some sort of speaker/audio output).…

Dec 27, 2024

Raven Smartwatch - Software — GitHub profile raven(embedded software) repository raven-gb(GadgetBridge) repository Software This is the second blog post out of multiple that I am posting regarding my project, the Raven smartwatch. See the first article for a broader introduction on this project, to fully understand the usage of the technologies introduced here. By the way, all of the software and hardware of this project are open-source. Technologies The smartwatch side This project is built using a collection of technologies which I have selected through research and previous usages within other projects.…

Dec 24, 2024

Raven Smartwatch - Design — GitHub profile Intro This is the first of multiple blog posts regarding a project I have been working on for the past few months. With this project (unlike previous projects) I have seriously attempted to plan, design, and document all aspects of the project during the phases of the project. In this post, I will discuss my thoughts on the design and planning of the project in its current stance. Posts regarding hardware, software, and UI/UX will follow shortly after this post.…

Oct 14, 2023

An argument for openness — The idea of broad openness in all systems around us, while seemingly extreme, is what I believe is necessary in the future. Specifically, this article will discuss the software side of this topic, concerning proprietary applications and their impact, as well as the effectiveness of open source projects. While this is somewhat based in fact and observations from myself and others, it is important to preface this with the idea that this is my opinion and my thoughts on this topic, and this article is mainly exploratory into the philosophy of openness in technology and its impacts.…

Apr 15, 2023

Welcome to my new blog — What are the older posts? You may notice that posts have been written before this one. I have ported my posts from Medium, as I greatly prefer the customizability and more professional manner of a blog using a static site generator, and I get to write posts in Markdown as well. My previous posts consider reverse engineering minesweeper for a end-product of forcing every cell in a board to contain a mine.…

Aug 14, 2022

Reversing and Patching Minesweeper Part 2 -- Advanced Modifications — Hello readers, and welcome to the third article in this series. In this article, we will be using our knowledge of Minesweeper’s code to make more advanced modifications, such as making all of the tiles mines. We do a little trolling. Going back to the Part 1 As a little refresher, in the second article we searched through Minesweeper’s code, and found where mines are randomly created, and where the timer started ticking.…

Aug 4, 2022

Reversing and Patching Minesweeper Part 1 -- Installation and Basic Modification — Hello readers, and welcome to the second article in this series. In this article, we will be installing Ghidra and setting up our project, then we will make some basic modifications to our target program. Grab a cup of coffee and be prepared to down it, because this is a long one. Time for our first modification! Ghidra Installation Once you have navigated to the link from the first article(you can also find it here), you will see the following page:…

Aug 2, 2022

Reversing and Patching Minesweeper Part 0 -- Introduction — Hello readers, and welcome to my first article I’ve wrote and the first in this series. In this series we will be Reverse Engineering a basic, old Windows Minesweeper binary and creating custom patches for our desired functionality. This is going to be a fun series. My goal for this series There are many different reasons why I’m starting this series. However, in general, besides having fun, this is meant to be a well documented, easy introduction to Reverse Engineering binaries as a whole; and some of this knowledge can even be used outside of this topic.…