Äike were an Estonian scooter company, which sadly went bust last year. [Rasmus Moorats] has one, and since the app and cloud service the scooter depends on have lost functionality, he decided to reverse engineer it. Along the way he achieved his goal, but found a vulnerability that unlocks all Äike scooters.

The write-up is a tale of app and Bluetooth reverse engineering, ending with the startling revelation of a hardcoded key that’s simply “ffffffffffffffff”. From that he can unlock and interact with any Äike scooter, except for a subset that were used as hire scooters and didn’t have Bluetooth. Perhaps of more legitimate use is the reverse engineering of the scooter functionality.

What do you do when you find a vulnerability in a product whose manufacturer has gone? He reported to the vendor of the IoT module inside the scooter, who responded that the key was a default value that should have been changed by the Äike developers. Good luck, should you own one of these machines.

Meanwhile, scooter hacking is very much a thing for other manufacturers too.

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams took a break to talk about their favorite hacks last week. You can drop in to hear about articulated mirrors, triacs, and even continuous 3D-printing modifications.

Flying on an airplane this weekend? Maybe wait until you get back to read about how the air traffic control works. Back home, you can order a pizza on a Wii or run classic Basic games on a calculator.

For the can’t miss articles, the guys talked about very low Earth orbit satellites and talked about readers who dumpster dive.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and don’t be shy. Tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

As always, this episode is available in DRM-free MP3.

Episode 354 Show Notes:

What’s that Sound?

• Congratulations to [Spybob42], who guessed last week’s sound. Come back next week to take your shot at a coveted Hackaday Podcast T-Shirt.

News

• Washington State Bill Seeks To Add Firearms Detection To 3D Printers

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• How To Use Tiny Open Loop Actuators For A Living Mirror
  • Making A Wooden Multi-Mirror Display Device
  • Daniel Rozin Wooden Mirror
• A Guide To Using Triacs For Switching AC
• Testing A Continuous Printing Mod For The Bambu Lab A1 Mini
  • swapmod A1m kit – SWAP SYSTEMS
  • 3D Printer Add On Makes Sharp(ie) Colors
• Accurately Aiming Audio With An Ultrasonic Array
  • Acoustic Mirrors: How To Find Planes Without RADAR
  • A Phased-Array Ultrasonic 3D Scanner From Scratch
  • Supercon 2024: Killing Mosquitoes With Freaking Drones, And Sonar
  • Build A Parametric Speaker Of Your Own
• Self-Powered Top Spins For Hours
• Inside Air Traffic Control

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • The Windows Interface You Didn’t Like, For Linux
  • Binary And Digital Gradients For Telling Time
  • Ordering Pizza On The Nintendo Wii (Again)
• Al’s Picks:
  • BASIC On A Calculator Again
    • https://github.com/ctosullivan/Python-101-BASIC-Games
  • Robot Sees Light With No CPU
  • Flux And Solder Paste Dispenser Looks Good While Doing It

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Skimming Satellites: On The Edge Of The Atmosphere

• Ask Hackaday: Do You Curb Shop Components?

Few things rival the usability and speed of a full-sized keyboard for text input. For decades, though, keyboards were mostly wired, which can limit where you use your favorite one. To address this, [KoStard]’s latest project uses an ESP32 to bridge a USB keyboard to BLE devices.

The ESP32-S3 packs a ton of fantastic functionality into its small size and low price—including USB-OTG support, which is key here. Taking advantage of this, [KoStard] programmed an ESP32-S3 to host a keyboard over its USB port while connecting via BLE to devices like cellphones.

There are some slick tricks baked in, too: you can pair with up to three devices and switch between them using a key combo. Some of you might be wondering how you can just plug a microcontroller into a keyboard and have it work. The truth is, it doesn’t without extra hardware. Both the keyboard and ESP32-S3 need power. The simplest fix is a powered USB hub: it can be battery-powered for a truly mobile setup, or use a wired 5V supply so you never have to charge batteries.

We love seeing a simple, affordable microcontroller extend the usefulness of gear you already have. Let us know in the comments about other hacks you’ve used to connect keyboards to devices never designed for them.