 Okay, a lot of people were expecting Thomas Wood's speech on next-gen data forensics. Unfortunately, he couldn't make it, and I got stuck in a weird time slot, so I got set up as a backup speaker, so you might have seen me in the back of the book listing me as a speaker, but you didn't see me in the time slot, so here I am. Anyway, I'm talking about making non-portable computer systems portable. Thomas ranges from homemade laptops. Let's say someone's always one like an Amiga 4000 laptop, some Sun or SGI laptop that no one ever made. Make your own homemade one, for example. Wearable computer systems. It doesn't have to be some geek kind of thing. It could actually be more practical devices for telemetry. I saw a lot of survey people carrying some wearable computer systems the other day. Wish I had some pictures of that. Car MP3 player systems. A lot of people are going to probably want to make those, or have thought about it sometime, taking like an old Pentium computer system, for example, putting in your car to be dedicated for MP3 playback. Or even possible network intrusion devices, which is one thing I thought about after I started researching this, came with some interesting ideas for that as well. There's three general areas I'm going to cover on this speech. One is going to be the user interface. Basically, you're going to have to interface with the computer somehow. That's how a computer works. You're going to have to put information into it. It processes. You get information out of it. It can be as simple as having a push button for the input and a blinking LED for the output. All sorts of things you can do. Getting it up to a lab is full LCD screens, buzzers, even computer synthesized voices. Also, I'm going to be talking about some power supply information as well. I wish I had some schematics, but I didn't bring those along due to the fact that I was rushing out the door in a hurry, and my roommate is a total idiot when it comes to computers. It's also housing as well, making your hard drive shock absorbent, using things like silicone memory gel and things of that nature to make your computer more survivable in the unlikely event it will be dropped. Because unlike your desktop system, this will be moving around at some point because it's portable, and as such, it is more prone to damage than other systems. User interface. There's a lot of things you can do, such as using a keyboard, for example. You don't have to use the whole keyboard. You can take a keyboard and totally rip it apart, pull out the small controller chip, for example, and just hard wire, basically a brand new board for it, because all a keyboard usually is just a matrix going to the single controller chip, and just wire up the buttons you want to directly control it, whether those are letters on the keyboard or even unmarked letters as well, unmarked keys. You can use a mouse or a trackball, you can use just the buttons or the entire device. Those are easy to take apart, and you've got two or three buttons right there. If not more, if you count the scroll wheel and some of the four button mouse is out there. Text-only LCD displays are also a great little thing to use. Windamp has plugins for that, and there's also, I was told there's plugins for Linux. I'm not a big expert with Linux, I'm learning, so I don't know exactly what to do with that and how to do it, but there's a lot of things you can look up on the web, as there's a lot of people who've made those kind of interfaces as well. That hopefully I will have next year. You can use just simple push buttons, such as, oh, let's say the game port controller. That you can short the variable resistor controls for the knobs moving the joystick back and forth and short those so it's a hard right or all the way to a hard left or centered with resistors, and you can get a variety of inputs from that or even MIDI, which is what like sideline or joysticks use for input buttons. LEDs, bi-color ones or single-color ones, sometimes all you really need is just a light to blink to tell you that the device has collected your information or is doing something or a row of LEDs. Speakers and buzzers are a very important thing as well. Whenever you take a desktop system and rip it apart to make it into a portable system, I always recommend you have the motherboard speaker wired up. This will tell you of the lowest level of hardware failure from RAM failures, CPU failures, motherboard failures, video card failures, that kind of stuff. And if you don't have the speaker hooked up, you can't hear those bios beeps. I used to work doing computer repair, and I've seen a lot of people throw systems away because they don't like the speaker, they pull it out, the system dies and just shows a blank screen. They can't hear the beeps to tell them, oh, it's just a bad RAM stick, popping a new one. So definitely have your speaker hooked up. Another alternative is to take, like, the solar pager motor, one of the little vibrating pager motors out of a dead pager. Those are easy to get. Just go to like pager stands, like shopping malls. Many times they have surplus and scrap pagers turned in. You could pick those up for a buck or even get them for free. Just take out the pager motor, worry that power you see fit, and that can discreetly signal you if you need it. This is more useful for a wearable computer system, for example. When you're modifying the keyboard, this is what I talked about before, where it's just many times a simple matrix. This is obviously overly simplified, but it gives you an idea of usually how keyboards are wired up. It's just the LEDs coming off the main controller chip, the PS2 connections, and the keys themselves. The rest of it is just for organizing the keys in a specific layout. QWERTY or foreign layouts, all you have to do is just simply rip it all apart, and you'll find many of the traces will actually form a matrix. It won't form necessarily the QWERTY matrix you see right here, but it will form some kind of matrix that you can reverse engineer, take a few hours to do, and get exactly what you need, just a few buttons you want out of it for controlling your device. Here's a picture of the one I built for my MP3 player. But it is. I went into a used computer store, got one of the really old keyboards with the mechanical keys, and the circuit boards were certainly the easiest to solder to, and just simply jumped some wires straight to it. They got the job done for all the play buttons I want, and stop buttons, and the other necessary buttons for MP3 playback. You can also use one of the membrane style ones, but those are real, painted in real, to solder. And these you can find real cheap, because not a lot of people like them. For your text-only LCD display, I wish I had schematics for this. There was a website I found two years ago where they had all the exact schematics for what you see right here, but I could not find them. The site went down when I went back. So I never backed it up. But this gives you an idea of how you can hook up a parallel-based LCD text-only display that you can rip out of many old computer monitors, ADT, home security system controller keypads. For example, lots of devices have these parallel LCD displays based on a Hitachi chip set. And what you can do is just have that serial port outputting your RS232, have a max 232 chip converting the RS232 over to a TTL signal, and then have a serial to parallel converter, which converts the serial TTL over to parallel TTL, which is what the text-only LCD display will require. For the five volts, since the serial port won't have that, you can siphon that right off your keyboard port. Sometimes you might be using it, sometimes you're not. If you're going to be using your keyboard port for extra power, I recommend you measure your amperage carefully. Many older motherboards have a keyboard fuse built into it. If you pull too much amperage out of the keyboard fuse, it will blow the fuse, and you'll have to desolder from the motherboard and solder on a new one. Pain in the rear is an understatement. Many of the newer motherboards, on the other hand, have a small poly fuse where it'll get hot. A contact on the inside will break, and eventually when it cools down, it'll reform the contact and reset itself. But you can't always rely on that, especially with some of the really cheap motherboards out there. So measure your amperage three or four times before you actually use it, like the old construction saying, measure twice, cut once. There are all sorts of alternate interfaces, for example. So many times you don't actually need a terminal on or a user interface on the box itself. You can tell that into it via ethernet, for example, if you're using some sort of Linux router of some kind, some small portable black box of some, let's say, you want to make a device for network intrusion, for example. Take a small black box with a small PC104 motherboard in it, solid state hard drive. Take it into an office somewhere, drop it in on the network, hit a little red button on it that's the start button, and walk away. Presto, you have yourself a box sniffing packets, or even better yet, on the inside of the firewall, going out to you, where it then connects to you, you talk to it and have it do stuff for you on the inside of the firewall. And all you do is drop a box down, hit a button for it, and you can tell that into it. Or when you retrieve the box back for password sniffing, for example, you take it home, just plug an ethernet into it, and tell that into it. You can also use serial, infrared, or even modems for that as well. Have the device call you, or you call the device. So your modem, for example, with really old analog cell phones, you can find dirt, sheep, or scrap, especially if you have a lot of money to spend, and you don't have a lot of time to do it, you can get really creative in a pinch. Another thing to do is, let's say you're using DOS, or even Windows, for example, you can just drive-share via the parallel or serial port. All you do is log in, place your files in there, or configure it, and hit the reset button, or reboots with a new configuration. Really simple, real easy to do. Another alternative is, of course, removable media. Zipped drives, those are cheap now for the 100 Meg Ones, PCMCIA hard drives, Compact Flash even. Compact Flash can, of course, be hooked up straight to the IDE with the right kind of adapter. So basically, Compact Flash is a type of IDE device. One of the most wonderful things I found for remote access for modems, yes, sir? Not on me, I don't have one, but you can boot off of it. It's seen as a, he was asking if you can boot off of Compact Flash, yes. Compact Flash is seen as a regular IDE device, yes. You can boot off of it if you get one of the adapters that converts it straight from the IDE, 44-pin connector, straight over to the Compact Flash. It is possible to boot off of that. A friend of mine has a router that runs off of a two-meg Compact Flash chip. And it does boot off of it just fine, just as if it was a two-meg hard drive. One of the most useful things I found for remote access is ricochet modems. When ricochet networks went out of business, these modems became dirt cheap since most people thought they were unusable. Several people in here, of course, know what you can really do with these. These also have a second mode, which ricochet networks do not like to tell the customers. You can use these things in direct, peer-to-peer mode. You can have one modem, call the other, and the modems use a serial port, as you can see with this one right here, just a regular old RS-232 serial port. And they use the haze AT command set. So you can literally take one modem, type an AT-DT space, and the modem serial number of the other modem. And it will call it. On the other modem, you hit ATA, or even ATS-0 equals 1, for example, and it'll auto-answer. And you have a nice secure link between two systems. These are extremely stable. I've even used a couple sometimes for really big file transfers from systems that don't have PCMCI, parallel, or anything else, but a serial port, no floppy drive. They need to transfer files over to it. I've had them running for 48 hours straight, without a single crash, or single disconnection. The modems you see from right to the big one on the side, that one is what's called a ricochet phase two modem. They have the phase ones and the phase twos look very similar. The phase twos have the longer cylindrical antenna. The phase ones have a small flat antenna like the gray ricochet modem you see there. Both of those are 28.8. The one with the LCD display is a 56K version. That is the SE. The SX is similar to that. It's very thin. I wish I had one to take a picture of. It's a very thin one designed to be fit underneath Windows CE palm tops. Now, keep in mind, this is a few years ago when all the Windows CE machines were hitting the market. That one is an SE. The SX is the thin one. Yeah, either one. They're all cross compatible with each other. The large one you see, the gray one, is a ricochet. Ah, I forget right off hand. I didn't write that down. Anyways, one of the 128K ricochet ones. Those ones, you can basically use it as if it was a full 128K modem. Although, of course, your serial port is gonna be running at 112K, so you're not gonna be able to utilize the full bandwidth. However, those modems also have a USB connector, so you can use it in USB serial port mode as well. Could you please repeat that? I'll get to you in a sec. The 128K one, I forget right off hand. It's in my bag, back at my hotel room. But you can research it on eBay. Just look for ricochet modem. You'll find pictures of that modem along with the model number. There's another model of that modem as well, which is silver in color. It has kind of ergonomic curves to the case. It is virtually the same modem electronically, but a cheaper-style case. I particularly like this style because it has a nice magnesium case to it. When I advertised in the Seattle area about four months ago looking for these, I was paying between like a buck and five bucks for them because ricochet networks was out of business. Now they're going up. They're a lot more on eBay. Oh, of course they will. Yes, they'll go way up what I have to do today as well. And the most I paid for one was for the gray 128K ricochet one. That one I paid about 10 bucks for. I've had people asking more money for them. I've had people asking so much as $200 for like the phase two modem because originally those were like $500. But of course I had to pass on that. Basically, if you wait a long time, you can get these dirt cheap. They have battery packs in them. The two black ones have nickel metal hydride. The large gray one has lithium ion. And yes, all the battery packs do hold a charge and do work. And yes, sir. Could you please repeat that? Okay. He was asking about a problem ricochet had with these modems where what they would do is they would block network access. If we were inside a ricochet zone in some area where they have ricochet coverage, the base units strapped to telephone poles would block the modems from calling each other. This is not a factor with the 56K ones in below such as the SE, SX, phase ones and phase twos. Those ones will be able to call each other inside the ricochet network. The 128K units, those ones had firmware changes in it that if you were inside of the ricochet coverage area, what would happen is if you tried to dial one modem to the other, it would not connect and would refuse to connect if you were not a subscriber. However, it is possible to get around that if you dial really fast, before has a time to connect to one of the base units and register itself as being on the network. Then it will call itself or call other modems. Also, they will work just fine if you're outside the coverage area and you're like, I can say, in the middle of the desert, for example, then you could call one modem to the other. And there's a lot of cities now that are ripping out the old ricochet base units. Last year at DEFCON, I took my ricochet modem, turned it on, and I got about four base units from the Alexis Park. I turned it on about five minutes ago before my speech and got zero base units. So many of the cities are ripping them out and selling them in public auctions, which might be a fun little toy to get. I'd seen them on eBay. As to how accessible these would be, I don't know about hacking the base units. I want to get one myself, but they go for quite a bit. There's a lot of hardware hackers out there who love to get ahold of this stuff. People like us. I don't know how easy it would be. I'm currently exploring unregistered S-registers or undocumented S-registers. All these units, you talk to them and configure them using S-registers, just like you would a regular 56K modem or haze-compatible serial modem, for example. I don't know how to download the old firmware from it so you can get firmware to reverse engineer. You might have to totally disassemble the unit and take out that flash chip itself and actually dump it off to a file. But I believe there is an undocumented command to just dump it right off as to back it up or restore it as a file. As to what that is, I don't know. I haven't gotten too much into exploring that. I want to do that. That is next on my list. There are programs out there that Ricochet did release that were just a single executable file in a Windows 3.1 that would flash the modem. It would contain the firmware inside of itself along with all the other necessary information. What you can do is find an older modem, like let's say a phase one, get the firmware upgrade for it, even though the Ricochet main page is down, you can find people who've backed up the old Ricochet files. What you can do is then hook up a serial Y cable and sniff and listen in on what the serial traffic is between your computer and the modem itself while you're flashing it and look at what commands it's using. See how it's accessing it, how it's talking to it, and possibly even reverse engineer away to get the firmware off of it. Of course, this is theory, I haven't done that yet and that is on my to-do list. And of course, someone out there is going to definitely modify the firmware so you can do direct peer-to-peer connections even inside the network. As to, has anyone done that yet? If someone has, no one has told me. I do have a website, I'll give you the URL at the end of the speech. That's one thing I forgot to mention. For eight, there's a URL on the text file, on the DEF CON CD, you'll find me listed under dragon something. And there's a URL on that that goes to wetcon.org slash T-Dragon slash DC10. There I'm gonna have this speech complete with the pictures, the text file I have that I was basing this entire speech on, which I write up as a preliminary alpha version of the speech along with, of course, pictures I took at DEF CON 10. We find all that stuff on the web so you don't need to necessarily take down too many notes here. Another thing you can do for the user interface is Windows will actually run in lower modes in 640 by 40. This is an actual screen capture of this laptop running in 320 by 240 mode. If for as to how practical this would be in real use, dialogue boxes get cut off and blown off the sides of the screen is really hard to see stuff and difficult to navigate it. But on the other hand, if you're using a small LCD display, you don't want to be distracted while you're driving to have nice big characters. You can run Windows in a lower resolution mode by forcing it to actually, you have to, there's a lot of stuff you have to do to force it to use these modes. First off, there is a drive table as you can see here in the registry listing what resolutions the video mode can do. Normally, the various modes such as 320 by 240 will not be listed. What you can have to do is you'll have to add those modes manually yourself as you've seen I've done here. The number right before or after modes such as 16 is 16 bit mode, basically 64K colors. Then of course you have 24 bit colors, four bit colors and eight bit colors. Four bit is of course 16 color mode, eight bit is 256. What you do is you add the various video modes you want to separate not by an X but a comma and you can add modes such as 320 by 200, 320 by 240 and 400 by 300. This is great for small MP3 players, even portable handheld devices that you may want to hack together out of used parts. I'll even show pictures of the one of the prototype alpha unit I made, which is back in my hotel room right now and show you how I did things and all that was done with junk stuff I had lying around my floor. Probably cost me about 30 bucks to put together. And it's destined to go into the trunk of my car when I get back to Seattle. The actual, the second thing you have to do to change the video resolution to a lower resolution mode is go into the settings itself where it actually stores the active settings. This is basically if you right clicked on the background and you brought up the settings and put the slider to change the modes from 640 by 480 up to higher resolutions. What you would have to do is no matter what windows will not let that slider go to modes lower than 320 by 240 even if you have the modes in the table. This is of course a design fly in Windows which of course I mean hasn't Microsoft ever heard of persons with disabilities. I did this with my grandfather's computer and he loves it because he has a hard time seeing. I use virtual desktop programs to create a larger desktop 800 by 600 and only shows a 320 by 240 window of that. If you change your modes a lot you can create a registry file such as what I have on my MP3 player, 320 by 200 by 240 dot reg. And you could see the mode right there all the text that would be in the content of the file itself. The first one makes sure that the DeBix per pixel are 16. Many times your system, if you had a system crash for example starting up in safe mode will throw windows into like let's say default mode of 640 by 480 at 256 colors. And if you just change the resolution back down you're in 256 colors at 320 by 240. Making sure that the bits per pixel line is there changing it, forcing it to go up to 16. Make sure that you both change the bits per pixel up to 16 and the resolution down to what you want to at the same time. Then you have the actual resolution itself. There are two ways to edit it. You could put it into the auto exec dot bat to boot every single time and force it into the registry. Every single time your computer starts up. You shouldn't always have to do this. You can use config sys, menu program, which I don't have an example of right here, but you can find all over the place. Those are really easy to find. It is built right into MS-DOS, like 6.0 and above, I think 5.0 as well. Not certain about that. And run it without regedit, without any command lines. It's just the file you want to add patched into the registry after it. It will then say updating registry and then we'll continue building Windows. And because Windows has not illustrated any of its device drivers at this point, it will start up Windows instantly in 320 by 200 mode or 240 or 400 by 300 if you want a larger resolution. If you're running it under Windows itself, the dash S I have found gets rid of the little box that pops up saying, are you sure you want to put this into the registry? This way you'll have to use double click on the shortcut icon instantly. It puts the settings in that you want. The reason why Windows usually has these low resolution modes in it is because of DirectX for video game use. Many people like to run video games and low resolutions to get better video game performance. That's less so nowadays and back in the older days. Windows 95 I found has some serious issues with running in low resolution modes below 640 by 480. It is possible with the right drivers, with the right DirectX patches, that's real pain in the rear. Windows 98 and above all do it flawlessly. I have not experimented much with Windows 2000. Would you have your hand raised? I have not explored much with Windows 2000 or Windows XP yet as to what it does because of course I'm not a big fan of Microsoft. I use it only because I have to and because I don't have anything else better until I get really good at Linux, which I'm in the process of learning right now. I have a dual boot even on this computer. Next, you're going to want to power your portable unit somehow when you take it with you. What do you want to power it off of your car's electrical system, off of batteries, or whatever other means you have available to you. Batteries are an extremely good thing to use. You can use gel cell, lead acid batteries, nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride, or lithium ion. Nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride are what I prefer to use with the strong preference on nickel metal hydride. Nickel cadmium is cheaper but nickel metal hydride has better performance. More amp hours per battery, less memory effect caused by continued charging, recharging. And also they are dropping in price because many countries are enforcing green laws. So nickel cadmium batteries are no longer available for sale because they have toxic heavy metals in them. Nickel metal hydride are of course much more environmentally friendly. So this will force many companies to produce more nickel metal hydride batteries. As a result, the price of those batteries will drop down. And they already are dropping down right now. As to using lithium ion, in order to charge those batteries, you can't just run a voltage through it. With the other batteries like lead acid and nickel cadmium, you can just run a voltage through it in reverse and they'll charge up the battery. With lithium ion, you do that and the battery will probably explode. How those work is they have a special chip located in the battery itself inside your battery pack that will control it and regulate it and keep you from shorting the contacts together or doing other bad things to the battery. And also make sure it's charged properly. The laptop itself will have a special charging circuit designed to send various modulated pulses into the battery to charge it up. It charges up just as fast as a lithium ion. I mean, as much as a nickel cadmium or nickel metal hydride battery. Yes, I know I'm starting a little bit. Oh well. Can you repeat that? Can you please repeat that? Marine batteries. Marine deep cycle batteries. I believe those are gel cell batteries which is a type of lead acid, they aren't. I have not experimented with marine batteries but that is another possibility. The lead acid, gel cells and marine batteries are big, heavy batteries that will give you a lot of amp hours, a lot of time on your laptop but they're big, heavy, bulky things. They might be exactly what you need, they might not. Can you please repeat that? Lithium polymer. Lithium polymer, I have not experimented with or researched that. So I don't know exactly how to use that or how to charge it or how all that works but that is something to research. This speech is to get you started with ideas not necessarily to tell you exactly what to do but it's just to fill your head with ideas for maybe a device you were thinking I'm building. Another thing you can do is use an existing power supply such as an AT compatible power supply, ATX or another type of power supply out of some other device. And an example is the small Macintosh twos, the really thin ones. Those ones have really small power supplies inside of them. Those would be great to pull out and use for small devices. If you wanna have a small power supply that's ready built you can just simply get some power out of. Have I seen plans to combine several existing PC power supplies to get more amperage out of them? Yes, it is possible to tie several existing power supplies like let's say AT or ATX power supplies together but I've never had a need to do that. I have measured my motherboard's voltage in my MP3 player and actually we're going through an inverter from a current inverter over to an AT power supply and then back to the motherboard counting the current draw from the inverter converting up to 110 and then the power supply converting back down to the necessary voltages for the power supply. I only got 3.2 amps total off of the MP3 player. So I don't know why someone would wanna need that much amperage but it is possible to tie several power supplies together for more power. As to how to do that, I've never had a need to research it so I don't know. You can also make your own power supply from scratch build one up. I'm currently working with an engineer in the Seattle area who is building a kit version of a power supply to run a computer off of 12 volts in a car. This will supply a full 300 watts power necessary to power your motherboard and it will be available in a full ATX version complete with advanced power management support. I was hoping to have an alpha version to bring here to the speech but Maxim and Nationals screwed up the orders of the samples and as a result I didn't have one to bring in time. When one is made available these kits are expected to cost about $50 and will be supplied. I will give you a URL on the speech site when they are available. Hopefully they'll be available within the next two months. So keep, if you're seriously interested in when these power supplies keep checking the URL that I give you and eventually it will appear or if it's not going to appear, ever appear or become available that news will be made available as well. You can buy 12 volt power supplies existing but those cost a lot of money one to $200 for the full ATX metal box style and of course they don't provide much power just five amps off the five volt line for example, five amps off the 3.3 volt. You have to power a small basic system but sometimes you need more power than that. This one we have fully well designed fully regulated, fully filtered kit you can put together. Another option for homemade power supplies is many people who have made their own MP3 players have built their own power supplies from scratch. You can look at schematics on the internet and download circuit board blueprints for how to print your own circuit boards with all the traces. I wish I had some URLs for that but there's so many out there that it's easy to just go to Yahoo or Google and look for like MP3 power supplies. You can look up the schematics for that real easy. Another thing you can use for powering it is what I call power leaching. Finding an existing power supply that's already in use on something totally different and using some of its unused power on a totally separate device. Another thing you could do for existing power supplies is laptop power supplies are also great little devices to use that I forgot to mention earlier. They have full regulation built into it. One problem with using an existing power supply such as an unregulated wall wart style one for like your modem, those are really bad to use straight into a motherboard. One of the big problems that they have is it breaks down to Ohm's law. Let's say your power supply outputs five volts at one amp. Your motherboard using a biscuit motherboard uses five volts at only half an amp. Due to Ohm's law, what will happen is that extra amperage has to go somewhere. As a result, your voltage will now be doubled. You'll be now pumping 10 volts into your five volt motherboard at 500 milliamps. As a result, you could blow your motherboard out or it could get very hot and you could burn out components on it. I strongly advise using an unregulated wall wart unless you know what you're doing. The best ones to use are laptop power supplies. You can find those at computer surplus stores, eBay. Many times the output, the exact voltage you need and they contain built-in regulators to dynamically adjust how much amperage they are outputting based on what your device actually needs and your current draw that your device will actually have. If you're going to build your own and design it from scratch, you need to of course regulate the power voltage because many times the input voltage will not be very clean, especially with a car, for example. When you're starting your car, the voltage on the electrical system can drop down as low as eight volts. When the engine running it can spike as high as 16, even 18 volts and that is not very good for your computer. So it's best to have regulators or switchers built into it that will control the voltage and condition it and make sure that the voltage itself is stable. Also, cars are extraordinarily noisy electrical systems. Not just the spark plugs in the engine, but everything from the lights, the stereo system, it's a very noisy environment, electrically. So you'll want to have a lot of filtering built into it. Also, you want to have circuit protection built into your power supply as well. In the event your power supply, your device draws too much current that the power supply cannot handle, you don't want to burn out your power supply. You want to have a small circuit breaker that kicks the power supply off, like those small reset buttons you see on some power supplies that pop out and you have to push in the reset button to reset it. It's best to have your computer go dead than to have it totally fried. This is an example of power leaching that I have for my router. My hub that I have at home did not come with a power supply. However, it ran off of five volts at 202 amps. So what I did was I took an unused power connector out of my router, stuck it right out the backplane, one of the backplane card connectors, I made a small adapter to run the hub straight off of the existing computer's power supply. The power supply inside the computer is capable of dealing with this as the 12 volts is barely unused in it. I had plenty of amperage to spare and the computer power supply is fully regulated and conditioned so it will not over voltage or over amperage the hub. As a result, I have a nice stable power supply to use and all it cost me was taking an old fan, clipping the connector off of it and getting a small five millimeter outer diameter, 2.3 millimeter inner diameter connector from Radio Shack. A cheap alternative without having to go out and buy a full power supply for it. Another thing you will want to do with your device is you want to put into consideration your housing. Many times you may think that just taking an existing metal case would be a good idea, not always. The reason why those are big, those are not very good for absorbing shock and damage and vibrations and will transfer a lot of it because of the hard metal case right into your devices like your hard drives, your CD-ROMs, even your fan on your CPU. If your fan gets blown as a result of that, your CPU will overheat and that could kill your entire system. So you'd want to design your own case from scratch and you could even design a case that is considerably smaller than what a desktop case would have. Wood is a good material to use. It may not, it doesn't conduct electricity so you don't need to worry about shorting wires connecting to it. Or you should watch out for ESD buildup. It's also easy to work with and cheap and I got quite a bit of it from a neighboring construction site. Plexiglass is... They have a lot of little small wooden dowels as to exactly what they were doing. I have no idea. I just know there was a pile of it one night. I jumped the fence, picked up a whole fist full of them. Great stuff. Plexiglass is good to use as well. Many times you see people epoxying it or gluing it together. The thing to watch out with that is the glue can crack and break. My design has a wooden frame built on the inside with the Plexiglass screwed to the wooden frame. So in the event it's dropped or is exposed to an excessive amount of Gs, the entire case will bend and flex as opposed to the Plexiglass breaking or cracking. Another thing you can use is foam core. This is what they use for display signs for some of the presentations and other signs you may have seen around here. It is basically a white foam type material with paper on the outside of it. It is available in extremely thin quantities, extremely thin layering. However, I found it up to a full inch thick. Before September 11th, I used to go to Boeing and jump in their dumpsters and they would throw away whole six foot wide by three foot tall sheets. All they would do is kind of a small corner of it and say, oh, this is not a big sheet anymore. This is not a full sheet. We have to scrap it, throw it away and get more. And I found like three or four like that that were totally thrown away that were perfectly good, like 99% complete. Also other small sections or even large sections that were perfect for my needs and my construction that were totally useless for the Boeing people for their presentations, for the board execs and whatnot. I have quite a supply built up of that. It's soft material. It is easy to punch through with your fist, but if you get it thick enough, it is great for construction work for your MP3 player because it is very easy to work with, can take a lot of Gs because of the soft foam and also many times if you find a good source for it, it is very available in bulk quantities. Same thing with plexiglass. Many times, sign manufacturers will throw away large sections of plexiglass in their dumpsters. Just jump in the dumpsters overnight, go thrashing. You can find sections you need quite easily. This is how I started building up sections of my plexiglass, which I'm going to be replacing all the foam core on my MP3 player with plexiglass as I find more of it. When you put your hard drive on the inside of it, you also see a cross section here of the foam core and the wood I've used. All it cost me was about 20 bucks for a box of screws, some washers and various other materials. The rest of it was all equipment I had lying around including the motherboard. I was lifting up some components the other day and found this motherboard sitting there on the floor. I have no idea where it came from. I have no idea how long it's been sitting there. I just said, wow, for motherboard I didn't even know I had Cyrix 233 megahertz processor, perfect. And decided to use it for the device as I wasn't doing anything else with it. It also had built-in video and built-in sound. Yes, sir. When I'm working with plexiglass or foam, how do I work with, how do I deal with ESD buildup? I have currently not experienced a problem with that. However, what I have is the motherboard grounded to the power supply and the power supply grounded. So theoretically, that should take care of any ESD problems. If you are working in an environment you know that where you have a lot of ESD, let's say your car, for example, builds up a lot of it. And as some people get out of their car and touch the door frame, they get a zap. I would recommend putting in like some aluminum foil and having that grounded to the computer as well. That way, if there is any actual ESD discharge within your player itself, it will theoretically go through the aluminum foil on the outside and then through your ground as opposed to going through the motherboard and blowing some of your chips. That is going to be something I'm going to do on a future unit. For cushioning the hard drive here, what I had was an old bike seat, one of the small strap-on kind that has a gel on the inside of it, much like a gel wrist rest on my keyboard wrist rest or mouse wrist rests. You can find these like real cheap nowadays for five bucks, peel off the fabric on the outside of it and cut the silicone memory gel out. This stuff is very soft, very flexible, and I have my hard drive mashed in there so that it will absorb an excessive amount of Gs. Hard drives will take, if you're going to be using a hard drive in your device, I would strongly recommend you use a laptop, 2.5 inch hard drive as opposed to a desktop style hard drive. The reason being is that these drives are designed to take more shocks, more blows than other desktop style hard drives. That doesn't mean they're indestructible, they can just take a higher shock impact from being dropped than a desktop drive will. So this way, if you're going over bumps in your car with your MP3 player in the trunk and it's being bounced around, your drive is more likely to survive. However, you should also put silicone memory gel all around your drives, whether you have a CD-ROM disc changer on the inside of it or whatnot, because many of these components were not designed to be put inside a car. They were designed to be put inside desktop computers, sitting on your desk, sitting still. So you want to absorb as much shock as you can through memory gel or other device or any other means. Another thing I would also recommend as well is if you can find one, use solid state hard drives. These are really cheap ones I found on eBay for just a few bucks. The Sandisk, the small 1.8 inch hard drive used in various tablet-based computers. I picked up on eBay extremely cheap back before hard drives, before people were really looking for solid state hard drives. And also the guy misspelled Sandisk, S-E-N-D-I-S-K. As a result, no one even saw it. Another thing I found was a guy in Texas, he no longer has any, by the way, who had a whole box of 40 megabyte solid state hard drives. He got it at a dot-com auction that they were gonna use for TV-top web TV-type devices. The company never went into business and the whole box of drives were auctioned off. I got several 40 megabyte drives. I got for 10 bucks a place and he threw in a 64 megabyte drive for free. Thank you, if you're watching this. You can find these all over eBay. They go up to, currently the biggest I've seen is 1.5 gigabytes for solid state storage, but I believe there's even more out there. And not all of them follow a 2.5 inch, 1.8, or even a 3.5 inch form factor. Some of them are really wood-shaped devices that they're still usable and even if they're wood-shaped, they might even be better for your device. For CD-ROM drives, I would recommend using a laptop hard drive. Not all of them use proprietary connectors on the back of them. Toshiba ones, many of them have a regular IDE-style 2.5 inch laptop hard drive connector, 44 pins. Over here on this side is of course the master slope settings. Here is where pin one is and as you move across, it's just like a regular hard drive connector. You can hook up your cable to it and use it just like you would any other hard drive. It's basically an IDE device. The extra pins on this side are for audio. These devices you can find very cheap. For a laptop CD-ROM drive, I would recommend going for as slow of a speed as possible. The slower the speed when it's bumped or shocked around, the less chance there is of damage because the faster it goes, as it's struck against something, all that centrifugal energy is going to be bouncing around the inside of the drive. You could actually strike a drive while it's spinning against something and by pure coincidence, have nothing happened to it. It would virtually absorb all the G-forces. Or when you hit it against something or it experiences a rather large jolt, all those G-forces could be like as if you dropped it from 200 feet up straight onto the concrete. So you're basically playing Russian roulette while you're dropping it as it gets dropped around. So slower your speed, the better the chance of it surviving because there's less energy being used inside the drive. And also, slower speed drives are cheaper as well. There's not a lot of people want 2x drives. And if all you're playing is MP3s, a 1x drive is overkill, speed-wise. This is my completed unit. God, I love that sticker. You can get it over in the dealer's area. As you can see, I have the Plexiglass on the top of it. And what I have on the inside here is this is an AT power supply that's used temporarily because of the fact that the prototype 12 volt power supplies are not available yet. That's just simply strapped to the side with some double-sided foam tape. I recommend against using any kind of double-sided foam tape or Velcro as that stuff has a tendency to come loose. I've stuck routers on the wall as a result of that. Small routers are relatively light. And many times the routers have fallen right off the wall, leaving the Velcro and the tape intact, not even taking the tape apart. And then, of course, when I peeled the tape off the wall, it took some of the paint with it. So it's really weird stuff. I recommend you bolt it or screw it down or use cable ties to hold it together that you'll get a lot more lifespan out of it. The video card I have inside of it is an ATI Rage Pro. What this is is a large video card that has a composite output for the LCD monitor I was using. The motherboard itself, I could not find the drivers for it because it's a UMC-based video graphics chip that no one has the drivers for. As a result of not being able to get the drivers, I can't run it in 320 by 240 mode. And as a result of that, it's pretty much useless for my needs. Plus, on top of it, I'd have to use a VGA to composite converter to use my LCD display. This video card I already had lying around, so I decided to go ahead and put it to good use. It was mounted on the side with a PCI razor card here to put it sideways as if I mounted it vertically like it would be in a desktop case, it would have virtually doubled the height of the motherboard space required. I have some small scrap sections of foam core used around here to keep it stable, to keep it from bouncing down against the motherboard or bouncing up against the lid. Here is the hard drive connectors, CPU. The RAM, even though the motherboard has both DIM and SIM slots, I have 16 megs of SIMs in there as those were scrap SIMs I already had lying around. I don't need much more for playing MP3s. Windows may boot somewhat slowly, but after it's booted, it works just fine. And on the side right here, I have the onboard motherboard video connector sticking out for the one in the event in the future that I get the necessary drivers I need to operate it. What I have here is this connector sticking off the side of it is for the keyboard connector. On the back of the keyboard itself, yes, I have a full AT-style keyboard and the trunk that will be strapped to the top of this with some Velcro. What that is, that's the output that takes the buttons being shorted, runs it through a nimbellicle cable out to a remote unit up front which will have the LCD display with the buttons at the bottom of it. This is a side view of the completed unit. It is disgustingly thick and this was an alpha version. I put together in a pinch. I was originally planning on having a full backpack-based wearable computer here but I blew the motherboard when I was trying to build my own power supply from scratch. As a result of losing a small biscuit motherboard, I was no longer able to use that wearable system and as a result, I threw this together in a day just to see what concepts would work and what concepts would not work. When I get home, I plan to cut this thing apart and make it only one-third as thick. The CD-ROM drive I'm going to eliminate that was a fun little experiment where I don't need it with a 1.4-gigabyte hard drive on the inside of it. That is more than enough to store all my MP3s. This is a picture of the remote unit I have. I have a small Logitech mouse strapped to the side of it to make it so I can use the cursors on it. Winamp, as you can see, runs in the middle and then along the bottom, these buttons relate to the various play, next track, pause, stop buttons on Winamp for the five main buttons and then these two buttons are for volume up and down. The device currently does not have an amplifier built into it and outputs through a 3.5... The small headphone style jack that's designed to go to an audio cassette adapter for a CD player straight into this car stereo system. I hope to have that upgraded later on. You'll find my speech online at this URL. This URL is also on the Defcon CD, which you were given when you registered. So you can go here, look at the speech, look at these pictures that I have online along with when I have the power supply kits available. News of that will be posted there as well. Does anyone have any questions? Yes, sir. Yeah. There would be a trucking now. There's like a big truck with a whole thing. I wish that was my truck. Any other questions? You first. Do I need to use a regular keyboard? I was originally going to have on the bottom of the remote unit an infrared port. Do you have a small wireless keyboard available for the times I would need it? However, due to some electronics constraints, I never got around to actually making a special splitter that would let me use both the system in the trunk and the infrared keyboard at the same time. And even then hooking up two keyboards at the same time can over amperage and overdraw the current on your keyboard connector, which is very bad for your motherboard if it goes wrong. I have had to use the keyboard for initial system configuration and to set the unit up. And after that, I pretty much do not need it. Oh yeah, I mentioned that earlier. Let's get up to it. Yeah. By taking you, you can take the controller chip out and basically reverse engineer the keyboard to make your own custom keyboard with just the buttons you need. Like many of people are pricing a small little keyboard about the size of a credit card, which is the Microsoft natural keyboard, nothing but control key, the alt key and the delete key. I'm going to build one of those. UNEXER. Ah yes. If you're going to be using solid state media like those solid state drives or compact flash, a big problem that they have is many of the early drives have insanely slow read-write cycles. They'll be even slower than a floppy drive. However, the read cycles may be even faster than an IDE drive. Another problem that they have is they have a finite number of read-write cycles. Eventually the unit will burn out, for example, if you're running Windows on it and it's swapping to the virtual memory. You can only write to it like 10,000, 100,000 times if for that small sector of the memory core, burns out and you can no longer write information to it. So you want to minimize the number of read and write cycles as much as you can. Linux and DSD and UNIX based systems are very good at doing that, which is why I want to eventually have a UNIX based system or a Linux based system running on the system in the future so I can use a small solid state drive. Yes sir. How about build custom antennas for 802.11 for some of the wireless access? Yeah. Yeah. I have not built anything as of yet for custom antennas to extend the range, but that is on my plans to make a Pringles can antenna. However, after watching the Seattle wireless speech and he recommends against making your own antenna because that is in violation of FCC regs by making your own Pringles can antenna, for example, or other forms of homebrew antenna for 802.11, I'm probably going to just go out and buy a more professional one. Yeah. For amateur radio it is possible to go ahead and build your own antenna from scratch because that is part of amateur radio laws. So you can make your own homebrew antenna for ham radio equipment, but many times for like the 802.11 card, for example, it's illegal for you to make your own custom antenna for it because it's not FCC approved for your actual device. Yes sir. Have I thought of using an accessory, the accessory connector on the car for powering up the computer when the engine is started and turning it off when the car is turned off? I have thought about that, but I would like to make my own manual controls for turning it on or off at will so that way I can have the system continue to play music for me, even with the engine off because sometimes I want to do that. But it is possible to have it automatically turn itself on or off with the car engine. And you could even, I've seen people do it just to have windows simply shut it down cold without actually going through the proper shutdown process. And although you're sometimes playing Russian roulette one in 10,000 chance of windows totally being foobard beyond repair, usually you're pretty safe doing that. Especially if you have a minimum install model, a bunch of extra little programs added to it or a bunch of other special little drivers. And if you're going to be doing that, shutting it down cold, I recommend you have two partitions. After you get your system configured and stable, move everything with like let's say X copy 32, C colon space D colon space four slash H, four slash I, four slash C, four slash K, four slash E, four slash Y. Basically four slash is before the word hickory, every single letter in it. That will mirror drive C over to drive D and copy every single file, hidden system files, everything including long file names. We have to do it under a DOS box and windows. This way you can back up your entire hard drive from one partition to another. So as you're actually shutting down the system totally cold, if you screw up your main partition, you can just simply take it and restore it from your backup partition, copy everything back over to drive C and have everything just as it was months ago when you initially made your setup and not have to totally reinstall and reconfigure everything from scratch. Then that several times my MP3 player is designed like that as well. Any other, yes? I'm just doing your driving, using interface. Am I using the mouse for the play and stop buttons? No, I'm using the buttons that I built at the bottom of the control unit. You have to forgive my crappy digital camera here. The unit, what it uses is I have the buttons arranged in the same order as the buttons in WinApps. That way I can use play, stop, rewind by just simply feeling it, as opposed to actually looking at it. Sometimes I would need to look at the unit itself. For example, one of the reasons why I want to use an X86 based system is so I could also surf the web, for example. Let's say I'm stuck in traffic. Some companies are thinking of starting up ricochet again and also there are other wireless internet options that you can use on the road. This way I can actually look at DOT cameras if I'm stuck in traffic and say, oh, eight miles down the way, it's still shoulder to shoulder, it's still bumper to bumper. I'm gonna get off the freeway now before I have to go through much of this. Then you further, I can also look up whether another information that I may want to learn about and actually see on the road. Of course I would not use that while driving. It's even more dangerous to be playing with this while driving than using a cell phone. But I have the visual options there with the LCD screen in case I'd ever want to actually see anything. Usually I'd just be going by touch and by feeling where the buttons are so that when I actually have to look at it, I can just feel it. Any other questions? Well, that concludes my speech. I hope that helped you all out in getting some ideas for if you have a plan on making your own portable computer system, whether it's wearable, whether it's in a small network intrusion black box device or anything else. Again, you can go to this URL to find my speech and other information. I have not uploaded it yet, but I will upload it when I get home in a couple of days, probably Tuesday or Wednesday. And also you can find the same URL on the DEFCON CD on my speech text file. So you don't necessarily have to copy it all down. Thank you and I hope to see everyone next year.