Building a Damned Good Watch: Counterfeiting a Calculator Watch with a Radio and Disassembler

Presented at REcon 2018, June 15, 2018, 3 p.m. (30 minutes).

In early 2018, I cloned a Casio 3208 calculator watch module with a new circuit board. My clone includes an MSP430 microcontroller, with a 4FSK radio that can transmit Morse code, find the frequency of an unknown transmitter, and clone the signal of a remote control. This lecture explains how the watch was cloned, how the signals of various radios were cloned, and how to build your own sub-GHz radio hardware. All code is freely available on Github, and I've been wearing one or another prototype for six months with less annoyances than my cellphone.

Presenters:

  • Travis Goodspeed
    Travis Goodspeed is a neighborly reverse engineer of embedded systems from Southern Applachia. These days he drives a 10 cylinder Ford E350 with a 50 foot microwave tower, but he has also ridden a fixed gear bicycle in Montreal when it was the only way to visit Recon.

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