I have good friends
It's been a lonely year, no doubt, but I'm very lucky to have a loving family and plenty of friends to lean on. While I don't see many people in the flesh lately, I do have frequent contact online, and my hacker friends have been critical to my health and happiness. Thanks to the hacker and DEFCON communities, I've even been able to make new friends along the way.
One new friend from DEFCON has made a pandemic project out of learning to cast gaming dice. He's been sharing his progress, from buying masters to crafting his own masters and resin printing them before casting his own masters. He's learned some pretty stunning coloring techniques, so I had to have a set of my own. When he posted a set that really caught my eye, I claimed it right away. He let me pick the color for the numbers and once they were ready, he put them in the mail. The dice are beautiful, and someday when we can get together again for some dungeon hack'n'slash, I look forward to using them.
What's in the box?
Now, when I received my package in the mail, and I was done marveling at my new dice, I noticed a small, paper envelope at the bottom of the box, white with black, seemingly demonic symbols on it. My friend had included an O.MG DemonSeed EDU kit! These were quite popular at DEFCON and I'd seen them available at Hak5. This was a very generous gift that I certainly did not expect! While I've done a certain amount of hardware hacking, my workbench has been neglected this summer. I took the kit to my bench in the basement, dusted off the soldering mat, and got to work.
I'm not going to cover my effort here. For starters, I've only gotten through soldering the programmer and the DemonSeed into a USB connector before loading a very basic payload. Also, I still haven't done the work I want to do to safely load photographs onto the site without spreading even more location meta-data about myself onto the internet. I do, though, want to put up the links I'll want later, and a quick note about udev rules.
Asking for forgiveness won't work this time
After you've flashed a bootloader onto your DemonSeed and soldered into the USB connector, you're ready to put a payload onto your device. Once you've configured your Arduino IDE for the Digispark and you try to load your sketch, you may encounter an error like this:
micronucleus: library/micronucleus_lib.c:66: micronucleus_connect: Assertion 'res >= 4' failed.
This happens because the default usb udev rules are set up to have the device
mounted as root with 0600 permissions. Thanks to this forum post
here I found I could create
a file at /etc/udev/rules.d/digispark.rules like so...
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="16d0", ATTR{idProduct}=="0753", MODE="0660", GROUP="dialout"
Double-check your dmesg output to ensure that you're using the correct
idVendor and idProduct for the device you've connected. Now when you connect
your device, and assuming your user belongs to the dialout group, you should
be able to write to your DemonSeed without trouble.
What's next?
By the seventh video in O.MG's series, things start to get pretty complicated as he describes ways to experiment with hardware such as radio interference, etc. This will require some time and concentration. I'll certainly share any of my own discoveries here. In the meantime this project has me inspired to put a little more time into playing with the various micro-controller devices I've picked up over the years, including a very cool programmer a friend and I assembled for the ESP8266 12F chip.
There's less than a week until DEFCON28: Safe Mode with Networking, and following that I have resumed my labs to prepare for my OSWE exam in October. It's going to be a sleepless couple of months, no doubt.