Note: There are some affiliate links in this post. You don't have to buy stuff with them if you don't want to.

One of the things I always wanted to build was a weather station. For some odd reason they always struck me as being intrinisically neat; sensors that could tell you about what was going on outside when you couldn't be outside yourself. Many years later when I got into amateur radio, I discovered that weather stations were a thing that people would build and put on the APRS network to broadcast local weather conditions. Thing was, I never …

Disclaimer the first: I don't know a whole lot about USB or device drivers. Those of you who do will no doubt point and laugh.

Disclaimer the second: Where applicable, I've given credit for and linked to the work of others. I've independently discovered a few things that others have already figured out, so one or two things may not be attributed. In that case, please let me know and I'll put a reference where applicable.

Over the past few weeks I've been playing with my OCZ NIA on and off. My first attempt at getting anything out of it …

I just returned home a few minutes ago from celebrating the greater feast of someone whom I have admired greatly for a number of years.

Fjalar Ravia, better known to the hacker community as Fravia+, was a master of reverse engineering software. Not just for cracking the copy protection of games but reverse engineering for the purpose of figuring out how code works for the sake of doing so. He was also known for his skill at crafting search engine queries to uncover the damndest things in the deep web. Since 1995, he'd written an amazing number of tutorials on …

While reading the files in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/usb/ I got it in my head to see if anyone else had spent any time reverse engineering the OCZ NIA, or at least had figured out how to get output from it. I spent some time a couple of days ago playing with it on Windbringer (running Gentoo Linux and all I was able to determine in the short time I worked on it was that it successfully registers itself with the Linux kernel's USB subsystem as an USB Human Interface Device (heh). After collecting some information I put the …