Microcasting Color TV By Abusing a Wi-Fi Chip (hackaday.com)

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 1, 2016 @06:24AM from the why-does-the-chip-keep-coming-back? dept.

szczys writes: The NTSC standard has effectively been replaced by newer digital standards, but most televisions still work with these signals. This can be done through a composite video connection, but more fun is to broadcast video directly to your television's analog tuner. This is what cnlohr has been working on, using a lowly ESP8266 module to generate and transmit the color TV signal. This board is a $3 Wi-Fi module. But the chip itself has a number of other powerful peripheral features, including I2S and DMA. This hardware makes it possible to push the TV broadcast out using hardware, taking up only about 10% of processor time. Even more impressive, cnlohr didn't want to recompile and flash (which is a relatively slow process) during prototyping so he used a web worker to implement browser-based development through the chip's Wi-Fi connection. Speaking of chip-abuse in the interest of hyperlocal signal propagation, reader fulldecent writes to point out a project on GitHub that "allows transmission of radio signals from a computer that is otherwise air gapped. Right now this could be useful for playing a quick tune or for pranks. But there are more nefarious uses as this could also be used to exfiltrate information from secure networks."

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Outstanding! by CaptainLard · 2016-03-01 06:47 · Score: 5, Insightful

This is the coolest little hack I've seen on /. since...probably dice bought it. More of this please!
One minor quibble, no need to editorialize the "POTENTIAL SECURITY VULNERABILITY". We already know everything is a weapon for terrorists these days. How about instead of "speaking of chip abuse" we have "speaking of $3 computers with tons of hidden functionality"?