Make: Online : Citizen Engineer - Phones: SIM card & payphone hacking

Citizen Engineer is an online video series about open source hardware, electronics, art and hacking. The first video debuted at "The Last HOPE" conference today in New York City. Volume 1is about phones: SIM card & payphone hacking. Learn how a SIM card works (the small card inside GSM cell phones) make a SIM card reader, view deleted messages, phone book entries and clone/crack a SIM card. Modify a "retired" payphone so it can be used as a home telephone and for VoIP (Skype). Then learn how to modify the hacked payphone so it accepts quarters - and lastly, use a Redbox to make "free phone" calls from the modified coin-accepting payphone...

Around the 12 minute mark it gets really exciting.

HD version @ Vimeo for close ups of all the soldering action or view the gallery photos.

More:
Simreader Lrg
Want to build your own SIM card reader? The SIM card reader/writer is available at Adafruit Industries, it is for experimentation and investigation of SIM & Smart cards. Once the kit is built, accompanying software can be used to read and write from the card. Together they can be used to backup stored SIM card data, recover deleted SMS's and phone contacts, examine the last 10 phone numbers dialed, etc. (Despite being called a SIM reader, it can also write to SIM cards). Source, schematics and software included.

Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: davis on July 18, 2008 at 3:09 PM

Nice, but audio is wierd

Very good video! However, the audio is quite loud and quiet in some places, which makes it hard to hear ladyada and pt speak.

Reply to this comment

Posted by: ellisgl.myopenid.com on July 18, 2008 at 3:33 PM

10V RS-232?

I thought that RS-232 ran at 5V as a norm.... On a quick check I'm seeing 3.3 - 12V.. That's one hell of spread...

Posted by: ellisgl.myopenid.com on July 18, 2008 at 3:47 PM

Redboxing...

I thought Red boxing was dead. Anyways, why not just by-pass the money to dial tone circuit?

Posted by: Shadyman on July 18, 2008 at 3:55 PM

Good job.

Great vid, you two! Very informative. I want one!

Posted by: DU on July 18, 2008 at 5:29 PM

two things

1) Why is it SO INCREDIBLY HARD to log in here? Why can't I use my Make subscription ID thing?

2) I tried to subscribe to the citizen engineer RSS feed and got some physics/math forum. ???

Posted by: jimbo on July 19, 2008 at 10:09 AM

Jimbo

Verry awesome video. Wonky audio, but easy to get over with the coolness of the total video, keep it up you crazy kids!

Posted by: Todd on July 19, 2008 at 5:18 PM

LadyAda you rock - great video. Wow it's been a long time since I've seen the old radio shack tone dialer. I still remember buying one along with some crystals at the local radio shack and making up some lame reason for getting both at the same time.

Posted by: mpeg on July 19, 2008 at 6:25 PM

Can someone put up a MPEG version?