endlos schleifen

VLANs (and more shenanigans) on the Netgear GS108 “dumb” switch

Just as the blog’s tagline implies, I tend not to publish things before I have finished them to my own satisfaction. As that rarely happens, even the pieces that might be useful to someone do often not see the light of day. Sometimes though, I manage to get fed up enough by the time I […]

An even easier way of rooting the Xiaomi vacuum robot (also, a generic bootloader backdoor on some Allwinner devices)

As part of my ongoing exploration of the internals of the Xiaomi vacuum robot, I took a more thorough look at the boot process of the Allwinner SoC today. It turns out they use a slightly patched version of Allwinner’s U-Boot tree. When disassembling the U-Boot present on the device and checking the source in […]

Recovering the root password of a Xiaomi vacuum robot

(Update: There’s a much easier way to get the root password now) I got myself a Xiamo vacuum robot a while ago. Being the kind of person I am, I opened it up almost immediately (and then bricked it). I’ll write a more detailed post on this soonish, but I figure I’d rather get the information […]

I fixed my editor with a BIOS update

This is one of the funnier problems I had in the last while: One day I noticed that my editor was really slow when moving the cursor vertically: (right: expected behavior, left: actual behavior on my machine) A quick search on the internet seemed to suggest that this was due to syntax highlighting and recommended […]

Running Linux on a Zynq without Vivado madness

Intro The nice folks at Trenz Electronic recently gave me a Zynqberry to play with, so I finally picked up the TODO to take a closer look at that chip. The Xilinx Zynq is a dual-core Cortex-A9 ARM processor. I recommend you take a look at the Technical Reference Manual (all references in here are to v1.10 […]

Reverse engineering a vending machine

So we got ourselves a vending machine. As we want to build our own control unit, some reverse engineering is in order. In this post, I’m not just going to state the results, but also describe in part the steps we took to get there. The fun is in figuring these things out, so I hope […]

Suddenly a vending machine

In the beginning of 2015, the local Freifunk project really started gaining some traction, breaking through the 100 node mark in just a few months. But the people running those nodes are basically still all technical people who don’t mind figuring out the right kind of router to buy and flashing some custom firmware onto […]

endlos schleifen — verb, German: Laboring endlessly on getting a project, essay or utterance just right, thus never finishing it at all