HackRF 101 : Everything You Need to Know to Get Started!

what is going on you guys it is the talking Sasquatch and it's great to have you back now today's video is something I've wanted to get into for a while now it's actually going to be on the haar ref with Porta pack this thing is so cool actually 3D printed the case for it obviously uh let's take a better look at it obviously it's got a 3D printed case that I designed with the Squatch up there hack RF with some transparent kind of neon yellow in the back it's really cool clear back it's got holographic little thing on there which is really cool if we turn it on here we go we've got oh wait hold on sorry guys don't want to get banned in Canada just a [Music] second there we go much better we've got the custom background on my Mayhem firmware really cool and actually even went ahead and printed out the SMA covers on the bottom you know cuz why not so I'm not going to lie the reason why I haven't actually done this video yet is because I don't know how to use it so we're going to be doing an entire hack RF series starting with today hack rf100 basically just un not unboxing cuz it's already out of the box but what to do on day one what the antennas do what the different parts of the hack RF do and what some of the icons and stuff are for we'll run you through the entire process of updating the firmware and actually a couple different really cool ways uh where to get some cool files for it and really what to do with it to get it at least ready to start playing with hey this video has been a long time coming but I am psyched to be doing this and I'm going to learn everything right along with you so let's go [Music] all right so first things first a bit of a disclaimer I know I say these things with flipper zero stuff but with a hack RF it's actually even more important you need to be very careful what you're transmitting on it is extremely easy even accidentally to transmit something on a frequency that you are not allowed to do especially just starting off I highly recommend until you really start to understand what you're doing and what you're trying to do to not even mess with the transmit commands at all just stay out of that part of the software I mean yeah we'll get there eventually it's one step at a time but for now let's just leave it for later now I did get mine on AliExpress I'll have a link down below you can also order them on Amazon hacker Warehouse there's a ton of places now it's actually really beneficial if you order one from your own country because they will have to go through customs and at least in America I've heard about these things getting taken in customs and in Canada it's going to be a question coming up so I did order the bundle that had the most antennas because what more is more right well I've been told that some of the antennas aren't as useful as others but I might as well go through all the antennas that I got and give you a little short description and kind of what they're used for now the first thing out of the box is actually a micro USB cable it's used for plugging the hack RF into the computer or to charge it this one says it's by LG but looking at it kind of closely I don't know I've got my doubts as to whether or not it's an actual LG cable but I mean it's a micro USB cable they all suck who cares so the first antenna we'll talk about is actually this big chungus flappy boy right here which is effectively a 2.4 GHz I mean it goes all the way up to 5 GHz but for the most part we're going to be using this on 2.4 GHz if you're wondering why it looks so familiar it's actually the same antenna that goes on that awok chungus board and the first time I saw one this is where it was same antenna really cool the next antenna we'll talk about is the small curly boy now this little guy transmits on 40 to 860 MHz most of the time you'll probably be hanging out in the 430 3 megahertz range which controls things like you know inexpensive lights garages any of the relatively inexpensive lights like this little guy right here that controls the light over there off and then on that would be in the 433 MHz range now we have the large curly boy now this bouncy guy goes from anywhere from 700 to 2700 MHz now this guy is good for things like mobile Communications like LTE or long-term Evolution if you're curious what that stood for now next one is this big heavy guy right here here which has the same frequency range as the the long springy boy but it's actually got a lot more power so much more powerful antenna and then that brings us to our last antenna which is the silver telescoping guy this one goes from 40 mahz to 6 GHz now it is important to note this is kind of the Jack of all trades of antennas um and you should actually be changing the length of it based on the frequency that you're trying to use it for in general if you use another antenna that's made to work specifically with the band that you're trying to use it's going to work better than this guy but again of all trades it works for pretty much anything now it also came with this male to male SMA adapter that goes with this amplifier now this little amplifier right here is made from 50 MHz all the way up to 6 GHz and it's supposed to give about a 20 D gain which is you know pretty good now I have been warned that the radio on the actual hack RF is a little sensitive so I'm honestly terrified of plugging it into my my actual hack RF so I'll probably wait for a while to do that but what I won't wait a while for is this segue to today's sponsor PCB way PCB way is your One-Stop shop for anything that has to do with pcbs PCB way can help you design create and assemble almost any PCB for almost any project they're actually currently working on a flex PCB for me right now it's so cool now don't forget just because they're called PCV way doesn't mean that that's all they do they also do 3D printing injection molding and Sheet Metal Fabrication on top of all that they've also got a module store where you can pick up any anything from Raspberry Pi to small TFT screens to sensors and more that's where I got my miniware es15 and my miniware ts1 C so check out PCB way.com for a free instant quote thank you so much again for your continued support and let's get back at it all right so let's do a really quick Anatomy lesson so of course up here is your top SMA or subminiature version a plug yeah super awesome name but that's where you're going to screw in your antenna that's it whenever you're running something like this especially when you're scanning with it it's always best to have an antenna plug in so I'm going to go ahead screw my antenna in if I do anything stupid hopefully I don't damage it you know maybe it's a Superstition but be careful so up top is this happy looking face right there so it's got two buttons the button on the left is actually going to be to reboot uh the one on the right is dfu mode so this is actually how you recover firmware if anything goes sideways it's also got a little happy smile there that's where SD card goes if you want to take a look at the bottom here we have the uh mini jack it's actually a headphone jack you can plug audio into my version doesn't have a speaker in it yet but you can better believe it will at some point and also right there is micro USB that's how you charge it and also how you plug it into your computer you'll also notice on the bottom too these other two SMA plugs right there I've got aqua colored little um SMA covers that I printed and these are actually for an external clock now basically if you're going to hook up a bunch of different hack RFS together you'll need an external clock because they all need to run at exactly the same timing now the hack RF does have its own internal clock just like a watch does you know the watch has got a little quartz thing inside it and that's what really keeps the timing on it the hack ref does itself internally but if you want to connect multiple ones they need to be synchronized and that's what those ports are for will I ever use that probably not can you take them off yeah if you wanted to but you know it's up to you don't let them bother you all right then we have some more obvious stuff we have the five buttons right here which are up down left and right and the middle button is basically select we've also got the knob right here which is kind of cool it's got little clicks it's a detented knob um I put on a knob from my Gibson Les Paul because I think it looks really cool and I had an extra knob uh you can 3D print your own knobs it's it's pretty much a really similar like this is the stock one that came with it and you know it's just a knob really they're easy to make easy to replace all right now that we've gotten past Anatomy 101 for the hack RF we can get into the real meat and potatoes of it and start doing the firmware who says meat and potatoes I don't it's I don't write scripts and sometimes I feel like I should all right so first thing we're going to do is actually update the firmware we're going to get some files that we want to have on the SD card and we're going to get some extra files that they don't necessarily give you but our good friend rocket Gods got you covered so first things first let's actually take the SD card out and you'll notice it is recessed you can't take this out right now without something so we're just going to grab a knife which I'm sure is the safest way to do this give it the old poke and now I think I can get it out ahof almost dropped it but I still got it now let's go ahead and plug this into the computer and hop over to the desktop all right so I'm going to show you two ways of doing the firmware the first play we're going to use the hack RF itself to get it all set up the second way we're actually going to use the web flasher so that's going to be fun too so first things first we're going to hop on over to the GitHub for the Mayhem firmware link down below or just Google it it's really easy to find but once we get in there we're going to go to releases and we're going to download a couple of files that are around here now the two that we want are the firmware and copy to SD card the copy to SD card has some assets on there like maps that we're really going to want to use so just go ahead and click them we're going to download those to the desktop here save one and then save the second one all right and then we're just going to extract both of those extract and then the other one extract give it a second and uh that should finish up all right so actually since we're already here let's go to SD card so these are the uh the copied sd card files open this up we're just going to contr a we're going to copy all of these and drop all of these down here now this SD card already has my uh my splash screen that I already set but that's it that's all it's on there so we're just going to go ahead and paste this it shouldn't take too long you can actually and I can show you later plug the portter pack into your PC and enable being able to write onto the SD card through the hacker RF however it's a bit slower this is the faster way to do it so I recommend just waiting for this hey we're done cool so now actually we can go right directly into this firmware folder right there and that's actually going to have firmware in it so we're going to go over to the Mayhem 1.9.1 we're going to find the bin file right here we're just going to go ahead and overwrite that replace now I'm assuming it's probably the exact same file anytime you want to update the firmware if you already have the SD card files all you got to do is download the firmware part and then we'll paste that into the firmware folder easy peasy so let's close this and this and what we're going to do is we're actually going to navigate over to our friends rocket Gods GitHub and get some files from him here we are which is GitHub uh it's rocket Gods GitHub for the hack RF Treasure Chest so we're not going to be using everything for here for the moment but we are going to download the zip and we're going to grab some of these files there we go we can close the window and wait for this to finish downloading two very boring minutes later now that that's finished we're just going to go and extract all just like we did before and again it's going to take a second we know we're in no rush but we're going to decompress a whole bunch of files one week later and we're done so we'll open up those files open up the treasure chest all we're really going to wh I lost them come back friend um all we're really going to do for today is I'm going to keep clicking the wrong thing that's fine we're going to grab the replay attacks we're just going to contrl C to copy those we're going to go back into the SD card for the hack RF and we're going to paste those files remember that waiting we just did we're going to do it again again we're not we got nowhere to be we're all good hey now we're done we have everything that we need on our SD card which is awesome so yeah let me uh flip a camera around so you can see the hack RF we'll update the firmware and yeah one step further all right here we go so what we're going to do is we're actually going to go ahead and take the SD card and reinsert it here it actually goes in upside down just like seems like everything else like this and grab our knife give it the old poke careful careful there we go clicked in ready to go now you'll notice that the background on this changed so to get off of this screen just press the button there and let me change my exposure so we can see what's going on that's a little bit better so actually real quick I'll show you how to change your background image just going to go into utilities I'm going to go into file manager and then if we go all the way down here we'll find where I put my Splash which is actually squash. BMP press the middle button press the right button now that's going to set it to our splash screen so if we press the dial here twice it'll turn it off if we press the dial here one time it'll turn it on and here should be our splash screen nice all right so now to update firmware this is super easy we're just going to go down to utilities again and then we have a flash utility that sits right there and then you can see there's our firmware so press the middle button one more time and it's going to ask you want to replace the firmware we do so yeah this takes 15 seconds they're lights on the top will be flashing you can see them flashing away right there and you know again a little more patience and this will be done hey we're done already it's that easy now if you don't know what version of the firmware you're running it says right down there so easy peasy now we are on the latest firmware now as I said before I'm not going to really get into how to use this right now we're just setting it up but I might as well at least show you what this top menu does or the top bar does so the title bar the first one where it says Mayhem this just brings up some information about the devs which is cool now here we have a screenshot button so we can actually take a screenshot of it and it will save into our screenshots folder we have sleep mode which is kind of nice if you're say you got it plugged in it's charging you can select sleep mode it'll turn the screen off if you press any button it'll bring it back then we have stealth mode and what stealth mode does is basically if you're transmitting it will turn the screen off so it won't look like it's doing anything um the transmit LED on top that will actually blink one per sec once per second so that you know it's still working but it'll make it a lot more stealth mode now the next few options are things you probably won't be doing or using um basically the frequency button you can change the frequency offset if you're using a powered antenna or anything like that which again we're not using so we're not going to get into it too much the next one is going to toggle the DC power for the antenna so if you have a powered amplifier something like that then you know you'll use that selection again we're not going to worry about that too much the same thing with the next one which is the status of the external clock so if we were using these two little guys down here for an external clock that would turn green next to that we have mute so basically you can mute the headphone or the speaker if you have one and of course the next one over there is just the SD card status so yeah basically that's got the whole thing working we can use it from here we've got everything we need except I'm going to show you one other way to update the firmware using uh web flasher and that's actually how they're doing the nightly builds of Mayhem so let's uh hop over to the desktop take a look at that all right so now all we have to do is head over to hack rf. apppp and that opens up their web flasher I absolutely love web flashers ever since lab. flipper. net FZ flasher and all of the you know online flashing tools for flipper zero I absolutely fell in love with how easy these things are so the fact that the Mayhem firmware has an online flasher I think is absolutely fantastic so just like always we'll just go ahead and click connect device we see it right here com 15 click connect and it's actually going to show us the live screen right now which works pretty good it's a little slow I'll admit that so you can see yeah it's a bit slow so it's not going to be exactly like you know how I show stuff with Q flipper but again this works for what we're doing but what's also fun about that is if we scroll down we can go to manage firmware and then update to latest nightly release very very fun so let's let's go ahead and do that we're click the [Laughter] button actually no it's not looks like it failed um nightly builds these things aren't always the most stable maybe I'm doing something wrong if anybody knows what's up let me know down in the comments editing Sasquatch here so the reason why the web updator didn't work is because in order to make it work all you have to do is install a nightly bin but the manual way that we did you know just for updating the firmware as soon as you do that the first time the nightly updater will work so that's what's going on thank you zaros for that little tidbit of information luckily nothing really bad happened just unplug it and we should come right back up no problem Oh while I'm down here let me show you another cool thing we'll plug it back into our computer and this is what I had mentioned before if we go into utilities we can go to oh yep that's it SD over USB hit run and then yeah that's going to pop up right on my computer just as a USB drive so if you want to transfer files that way you can it's probably I'm not 100% it's probably over SPI so it's probably really slow but it's a good way to connect it to your computer so yeah that's the absolute Basics on how to get your hack RF with portter pack ready to go now do you have to do all this no of course not but all those SD card assets are going to make your your hack RF a lot more capable and obviously the latest and greatest firmware is always good to have we're in it together now so we're going to learn how to use this thing I promise thank you so much for watching please make sure to like comment subscribe it helps me out a ton we'll catch you next [Music] time

Channel: Talking Sasquach

Views: 34,096

Keywords: flipper zero, hacking, technology, talkingsasquach, talking sasquach, flipper zero hacks, flipperzero hacks, flipperzero how to, flipper zero talkingsasquach, flipperzero talkingsasquach, flipper zero talking sasquach, flipperzero talking sasquach, talkingsasquatch, talking sasquatch, hackrf one, hackrf one portapack h2, hackrf portapack h2, hackrf one vs flipper zero, hackrf one portapack h2 tutorial, hackrf one tutorial, hackrf mayhem, hackrf mayhem 2.0, ethical hacking

Id: xGR_PMD9LeU

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 18 2024