 Greetings, unboxing friends. It's another month and it's another HackerBox from HackerBoxes.com. I don't get paid for this endorsement. I'm neither endorsing nor not endorsing this. I just subscribed to HackerBoxes and I thought it would be interesting to unbox these as I get them. This is HackerBox number 0039 Level Up. So I suspect it has something to do with video games or level shifters. It's heavier than usual or at least it seems to be heavier to me. Let's see what's inside. Alright, we've got another USB cable. I think I got one from the previous HackerBox. Alright, interesting. Here's a bunch of little terminals for not banana plugs. No, just wires. So that's interesting. And we've got what appears to be a USB breakout. Nice. I could possibly use that. And we've got a USB thingling. What's in it? What is it? I don't know. Focus. It is transparent and it says RDX on it. Not sure what it is. But you can plug it in to a USB port. Nothing on the side. Am I missing anything? No. Nothing. I don't know what it is. Some of you probably do know what it is. Yeah, I'm kind of loathe to just plug random things into my computer but I don't know. I trust HackerBoxes. Okay, here we have a 3D printed case of some kind. And ooh, what's this? Okay, so far I don't know what level up is referring to at this point. Oh, that's kind of neat. It's got an LCD on it. It says winners, ground v out, ground v in. And are there buttons? Yeah, so I suspect that this is one of those boards where it's just basically a simple like, you know, lab thing with a little LCD display. So it's probably a voltage generator maybe. You can plug this in and see. What else? Wow, lots of boards here. Interesting. Is this for a power supply maybe? Plug the power supply in. You got plus and minus 12, 5 volts and 3.3 volts. Yeah, it looks like you would plug in like an ATX power supply to this. I have one. I have this. I really like this one a lot. This one is from Dangerous Prototypes. It's got these terminals that you can put banana plugs into. It's got this neat little button, which I like. It's got fuses on every output. So does this, but these are kind of these big glass ones. Of course, you can always replace them. So, and it's got LEDs. There's an LED for mains on, power, good, and I think there's an LED for each one of the power supplies. And this one also has minus 5 volts if your power supply does provide minus 5 volts. So I really, really like this and I highly suggest these because you can just get ATX power supplies from junk and just plug it in and then you've got a nice power supply. But, you know, that's this and I guess that's what these go with. So, yeah, I don't know if I'll be using this, really. But it's a neat thing if you didn't have this. Got a bunch of resistors, got a bunch of LEDs, got a bunch of transistors, and a bunch of buttons. I smell a kit. Oh, neat. Got a challenge coin. Novus Ordo Technica, a new technical order. Okay, nice. Hacker box, challenge coin. Weird. Nano SIM adapters. Okay, all right. That's kind of neat. RTL, yeah, RTL gates. That's kind of cool. Oh, neat. I like that. Yeah, RTL gates. You basically see these inside 7400 series chips, not as inputs or outputs, but sort of like intermediate gates. That's basically all this is. Well, maybe not like this. Usually they're base driven, but, oh, and it's a hacker box's PCB also. That's kind of neat. Yeah, that's what that kit's all about. Oh, and look, there's also a buffer and an inverter. So, you can learn all about RTL logic, resistor transistor logic. That's pretty cool. And you get a sticker and a hack life iron on patch. All right, well, that's pretty cool. So, what does level up mean? Well, maybe voltage levels, because each of these has a threshold. So, when you connect one to another one, the thresholds are important. And that's what the input and output stages of TTL chips are really for. They're for making sure that the levels are correct. So, yeah, that's kind of interesting. I still don't know what this thing is, and I still don't know one nano SIM card in all mobile devices. So, they're a nano, oh, I see, okay. So, this is just a thing that they throw in so that you can have it. So, I guess if you have a nano SIM card, you can turn it into a micro SIM card or a standard SIM card. Or if you have a micro, you can turn it into a standard. So, it also says free. I hope they got it for free, because really, I honestly don't really see a use for this. But that's just me. Right, so this is the kit for this. This is a voltage output. Let's go ahead and hook this up and see what happens. So, I'm going to hook it up to, well, it just says VIN. And it doesn't actually say what VIN should be. I'm going to start, I'll bet it's probably 12 volts, but let's start with 5, just to be safe. So, I have a 5-volt supply here. There's one wire, and there's my second wire. So, now I just need some wires for this. I have a red wire, and I guess I'll be using a purple wire. All right, let's hook this up. So, a red wire is going to be the VIN. I just need a screwdriver. Let's see if this is good enough. Nope, too small, too big. You can't tighten these up too much, because the only thing holding them on are the solder pads. So, yeah, don't apply a lot of torque to this. All right, so this is a fixed 5-volt supply that I'm hooking up. So, I know that I'm not going to ruin anything. Let me just make sure VIN is connected. All right. Okay, so it's displaying 4.35 volts at .1 amp. Let's press these buttons. Nothing. Okay, well, if I press this button, this thing goes down. If I press this button, this thing goes up. It's not very quick. Yeah, it's like, it doesn't instantly respond. So, you know, you're typical, cheap, you know, somebody decided to put together a board based around a chip and, you know, wrote a program that doesn't work very well. That's typical for these sorts of things. I've got, you know, you can get like component testers that look like this. What else can you get? You can get electronic loads that look like this, and none of them are fantastic, but, you know, they're cheap and they do the job. I guess this is for this. Let's measure this. Where is my DMM? Where is my voltmeter? What did I do with my voltmeter? Losing one's voltmeter is not a good thing. All right, so it's saying .37 volts. I mean, 37 volts. Let's see what my meter says it is. Yeah, 3.665. So, if I increase this and let it choose something, 4.2 volts, close enough, is this a boost buck converter? Let's see if it's a boost converter. Wow, I'm pushing this button and nothing's happening. Okay, let's lower the voltage. Nothing is happening. Absolutely nothing. Oh, there it goes. It finally decided to respond. All right. Yeah, it looks like the most that it can do is 4.3 volts based on a 5-volt supply. I'm going to increase the supply because that's how I roll. So, I've got my other voltage input here. This one is outputting 4.8 volts. So, it looks like the maximum that we can get out is 4 volts. So, let's increase this. Yeah, okay. Let's see what happens if I... Oh, okay. I think I've reached its limit. I'm putting in about 9 volts or so, and it's saying 7.7. So, that is... Oh, wait. I can increase this even more. Okay, now it's increased to 8 volts. Let's see if I can go higher. I can. All right. Now it's stopped again. I'm putting in 12 volts. Can I increase this? Yeah. Well, that's pretty weird. What a weird little device. I don't know what its internal logic is, but it is outputting 10.5 volts. So, all right. It looks like we've got a buck converter. A digitally controlled... Well, a button controlled buck converter. That doesn't respond to button presses very well. All right. Well done, whoever you are. Winners, winners. Would I use this in a pinch? No, I totally would not. For one thing, you need a voltage supply to feed this. I guess a 12-volt voltage supply would do. You know, and I guess that would be something like this. And then you can hook this up to this to get whatever voltage you want. Me personally, I would just go on eBay and find a cheap power supply that you can adjust. This is compact though. And I guess it's outputting what current it is delivering. I suppose I can put a resistor in there and see, but I don't know. I don't want to break this thing. I'm still kind of puzzled as to what this is. All right. So level up apparently means voltage levels. So we've got voltage levels here. We've got, you know, I guess kind of voltage levels here. We've got voltage from here that you can get using an ATX power supply. Oh, interesting. This one has more pins. I know that there's a difference between ATX power supplies that some of them will fit on this and some of them won't. So I don't know if one is compatible with the other. It looks like it is. There are different shapes to these pins and the shapes seem to align like this. So I guess you wouldn't plug in this part. I don't know. So, and you know, one of these things, again, I still don't know what this is. I'm really puzzled, but I'm honestly, I'm not puzzled enough to plug it in because I am not in the habit of plugging USB devices into my computer is when I don't know what that USB device is. I'm sure it's fine. Ah, is this an SD card reader? There's a slot. Let's see if I can find an SD card. Yeah. Okay. Well, I've got this and that doesn't fit in here. So is it a microcard? Okay. I don't know what this is. So it's not an SD card reader. I could probably take a picture of this and do a Google image search, but I kind of like to puzzle out what it is on my own. Okay. So they did include these SIM card things, but why would, does this take a micro SIM? Well, I guess I'm going to open this up and find out. Where's my razor blade? Razor blades are the most useful thing that you can own or one of the most useful things because you can pretty much open everything with it. That's weird. Where did this come from? Yeah, you can pretty much open, you know, boxes and bags and, you know, all sorts of stuff. Here we go. It was lying right here. Let's take a look. There's a little piece of tape here holding it on. Nope. This is just a holder. Does the holder go in here? It kind of doesn't. Maybe it goes in this way. It is a SIM card holder. In fact, if you put it in this way, if you put it in this way, it looks like, yep, that's the way it goes. So this is a, I still don't know what it is. Well, I mean, if it's got a SIM card holder, then presumably this is to connect your computer to a wireless, to a mobile network, I guess, I suppose. Okay, that is kind of interesting and perhaps somewhat useful if you don't have internet access. You just pop your SIM card in here. Pop that into here if you dare. This isn't going in very well. But anyway, oh, it's already, it's already kind of cracked. Anyway, you pop your SIM card into there and presumably you get access. It's kind of a low chip count. I wonder what these chips are. Did they rub? Did they rub off the numbers? I think they did. So I don't know what this is. Well, anyway, that is Hacker Box number 39. Level up.