Modifying the iPod

hey congratulations that's really good awesome thank you another clap sylvia yeah oh gonna be honest yay it's it's one of the downside of being online you don't get that interaction but it was a great talk um so i'll introduce our second speaker um so our second speaker tonight is uh p rankin who i don't think actually needs any introduction he's quite uh familiar to us at these sides and and seasides we actually had someone pull out so pete kindly us got up and uh offered to speak at the last minute which is great for us because he's always doing fun and crazy things um all the time so um pete in his full-time job is a researcher at azimuth

security and he used to work as a software engineer for pen ten and the australian department of defense um when he's not working he's doing weird and wonderful projects all programming besides canberra badges which he's done um the the 2019 badge and worked on the 2020 2021 badge and tonight pete is going to be talking about modifications he's done to the ipod so thanks pete for coming and speaking to us ah thank you for having me uh it's always good to come and give our presentations let's see if i can get my slides up that's the real trick

good yep looks like it's working okay um thanks everyone uh sticking around to see my talk uh it's a bit of a short talk tonight um but hopefully like i think the main takeaway i want to get people is uh go out and hack something just do a modification change something because tonight's talk is on modifying an ipad classic but a lot of the things that i show you in here can be done to a whole range of other things um so yeah modifying the ipod

there we go all right um so carly kind of gave me an introduction um again i work at asmr security you can always reach out to me if you want to know more otherwise like i spend my days basically reversing code um also do a bunch of development c and cms plus big fan of retro and nintendo um and like volunteering for b-sides i highly recommend it um it's good experience and good bunch of people um also like you know getting involved in the badge and doing some hardware stuff it's a good way to learn techniques and we're always looking for people to kind of help and assist this is where it all started for me um

back in 2004 i was up in cairns and i was walking through a shopping center and i saw a display for the third generation ipod classic this one right here and it blew my mind and i'll explain to you why because back then if you had a cd discman maybe you made an mp3 one but really you had one cd's worth of music with you wherever you went this was a 15 gig one that i ended up buying which can hold like i think 20 000 songs or something like that but it like just the quick numbers like i can put every cd i ever owned and more on this little box you know and i got one and it was

amazing it got me through year 12 in high school and then through uni years fantastic little device but i think the problem is that these days we have access to all these streaming services so you don't need a big hard drive you don't need a big music player because you can just stream everything and it's so much easier and so it's probably been about 10 years since i've really used an ipod but that brings it to a question like why would you use an ipod 20 in 2020 well i think as a security community the first thing i'll mention is privacy now if you're using a streaming service like netflix or spotify the thing you have to

remember is that even if you're paying for those services and you're not seeing ads that does not mean that they're not collecting data on you and that data is not being sold for advertising and that the music that you listen to can influence the advertising and things that you are showing in your day-to-day browsing so if you're concerned about privacy um an ipod with no internet connectivity and no way for it to provide the data back to the internet for you know tracing um your movements or what you like to listen to um could be a good thing for you so if you're big on privacy and you want to kind of decouple yourself from streaming services it's a

good place to start retro there is a big boom in people taking these old-school devices and modifying them i'm seeing now like people adding high resolution displays to game boys there are people chopping up wii consoles and putting them into small form factors there's a whole range of people doing all sorts of projects at the moment it's for me i find it to be a bit of an exciting time to be um doing all these modifications because everyone else is coming out with all these cool ideas um so yeah if you're big on retro and you want to have some classic piece of history that actually works really nicely it's a good project and then the third

thing is with covert and a lot of us being locked up you know you can only watch so many tv shows you can't go to shops you can't travel a nice hardware hacking projects even if it's not something you're going to use every day because i'm definitely not just going to throw in my phone and my streaming services and use my ipod but it is an excellent learning exercise it will teach you better soldering skills it will teach you about like searching online and finding other people who are doing similar projects so even if it's not an ipod i'm sure there's something out there that you can take and modify and bring some new life to

so okay you've decided like me to go crazy and buy an ipod classic and relive the memories of your high school and uni years or maybe that's just me and i'm a bit sad but the there's a couple of things taking consideration so i'm not including uh ipod nanos or shuffles or the touch ipods and the reason for this is that there's not enough space there's not a lot of support in replacing hard drives maybe you can place the battery but if you really want to add things to it and make it better than what it was an ipod classic has room inside the case that you can actually do some cool stuff with and also within the range of ipod

classics you've got different generations so the one i showed you earlier was a third generation ipod that was the first one released in australia about 2004 and they go all the way up to generation 7 which is the one that's on this slide in front of you now the generation is important because it will affect the maximum storage that the ipod recognize there is a hardware limitation in some generations of ipod that actually prevents it from recognizing larger capacity disks and so that's an important consideration the other thing is performance so newer ipods which can store more songs have more ram and more ram in an ipod means that if you're going to load this

thing up with like millions of songs you're going to want more round because the whole thing is managed in a database that's loaded into memory on the ipod and if you don't want to crash and reboot you're going to need to maybe pick a later ipod that being said if you're only looking to upgrade an ipod to like 256 gigabytes any generation is probably going to be fine the other consideration is thickness so there are actually different generations of ipod that have different thicknesses to the case and this will affect whether you can put a bigger battery in it um where you can put like a bluetooth module in it those sorts of things um and if you're like me and you ended

up buying a thin model one it's okay you can buy a replacement backplate and front plate they're actually a bit thicker and that's kind of important because if you're like me and you're a gumby when you open the ipod you will actually break these tiny little clips there are 13 of these little suckers all around the ipod i've done two ipod openings now and on both times i've damaged the back the front and the clips so buy yourself replacement back and replacement front because these things are hard to open that being said they're not as hard to open as the newer iphones which are basically welded shut and the most important point um if you're choosing an ipod is to pick

based on what you want it to be maybe you have fond memories of an old ipod video or an ipod photo and you love the look and feel and design aesthetics of it if you're only looking to put like you know 256 gigs in there why don't you just mod that one you don't need to do the latest you don't need to up it all the way to huge amounts of storage do the one that you actually want to have so next thing how much storage do you want to put in it so there's this wonderful company called iflash and they sell a whole bunch of these little um pcbs the thing that's in the middle

that's black and that replaces essentially your ipod hard drive so it has the same ipod connected here but you can plug sd cards into it and it's kind of a bit like a raid system where you put in different size sd cards and it accumulates them into one physical disk and so you can put like four or one terabyte cards in there but an important consideration is that an ipod at most can recognize two terabytes of storage there's a kind of like an insta overflow in the software for an ipod so if you decide to put in two terabytes and 100 meg it's going to overflow the two terabytes and only recognize a hundred meg

so two terabytes is the most you can make an ipod also hard drives and ipods will die they will die now they'll die eventually you're probably going to buy a second hand one just do yourself a favor and replace it with this it'll also make your ipod run a lot faster the original hard drives nail pods were designed to stop and click when they weren't um in use and then when you want to go the next song it would take a while for the hard drive to spin up and go the next one these are instantaneous because they're solid state drives so you'll notice amazing improvements over your ipod they're also very thin they're a lot

thinner these are eye flash boards than [Music] your traditional ipod hard drives so you can fit more stuff in there like a bigger battery or a bluetooth module they even have a model of this that will fit an m2 ssd and you might be thinking like well why don't i use an ssd well the thing is that it will draw so much power that you actually need the biggest battery and they recommend that you only have the device hooked up to power for about two hours otherwise it'll basically melt through its case it'll get that hot also i'm amazed that they now have one terabyte microsd cards like i bought 512s when this came out

and then all of a sudden one terabytes came in so good okay moving on uh battery so if you decide to put a new battery in your ipod um you can put a replacement one which is the same size same battery life as what you had before or you can put in like mobile phone size 300 3 000 milliamp hour batteries and then all of a sudden you have an ipod that you can turn on start playing music and leave it on for a week and it will still be running in a week's time like there's just so much more power than what the ipod was originally designed for so if you want a device

that you can just travel with and never have to plug into a charger it's kind of cool also the original ipods had lithium-ion batteries in it and over time the batteries expand and at worst case they can push up against your screen and crack your screen or at the worst case scenario they will explode into fire so if you're buying a new ipod and you're looking to do these modifications highly highly highly recommend just get a new battery okay so the next thing i did which is a little bit different because those first two things are kind of common things that people do with ipod modification um i'd seen a couple of people like basically replace

the dock connector in older generations of ipods with usbc but none that it actually made it like um run at the same time with the new generation ipod so the thing to remember about usbc is that it has built-in legacy support and if there's one thing that i want you to take away from this slide is that to add usbc to any usb2 device you only need to connect four wires that's it there's no chip there's no extra hardware you just have to find the data lines and the power lines the four wires for usb and if you join those up it will just work and if you're trying to figure out where you're going to

solder to on the motherboard to figure out like where am i going to join up um the lines on the usb c pcb the green thing in the top corner on the motherboard what you can do is you can get your little ipod dock cable here and you can get a little breakout thing for usb and you can plug those two together now what you have here then is if you plug this into your ipod with the motherboard exposed and get a multimeter you can actually put it on one of these pins and then poke around the motherboard until you find a continuous connection and that way you can actually buzz out where the usb pins are on the

motherboard you can solder the wires to the usbc connector and it's done the hardest part of this mod is actually putting a hole in the case in the right spot and if you're like me don't use a hand drill use a drill press go to someone's house because you don't have steady hands i thought i had steady hands i don't have steady hands and you'll miss your scratches of the case um you can kind of see here this is my uh you can see around the edges that i missed quite a few times and scratched it but other than that you can have usbc and if you do it like this you can have both the dock connector and

the usbc working at the same time now if you're not looking at doing an ipod classic mod okay cool but maybe you have a wireless mouse with a usb dongle now if you have been going out and buying a new macbook which only has usb c ports you have to fit something between the receiver and the laptop what you could do as a project is actually remove the usb 2 connector on the receiver and just solder on the wires for usbc and you've just made a usb c dongle without any extra hardware so bluetooth there's an important reason why you might want to add bluetooth to your ipod and that is that you will have your

favorite pair of both bluetooth headphones or you have like a bluetooth speaker that you have in the kitchen or your car will only have bluetooth connectivity for music um there are so many things that if you're just relying on a headphone jack uh you're going to be limited with an ipod so you've got extra space in the case you just have to join up some wires and you can have bluetooth so if you buy one of these little bluetooth receivers you can actually open it up like i have and you can pull out the pcb from it and just join a couple of wires to it and you've got bluetooth in your uh your ipod

and the other thing is that if you do it um if you do it this way and you join the headphone wires to the headphone socket but leave it in place you can have both bluetooth and a working headphone jack in your iphone in your ipod and this is really important because apple made a big deal a couple of years ago about the courage that they had when they released the iphone without a headphone jack and how they want to change the market there is no reason to remove a headphone jack from an ipod you can have both bluetooth and a headphone jack working at the same time and it's kind of funny because an ipod

that i've come up with has a usbc connector and a headphone jack which makes it have more connectivity than even the new iphone 12 which is still on a lightning port connector okay so we've got our bluetooth board we've got our usbc connector and we've got our iflash hard drive replacement and if you put all these things into the case they're not going to fit straight away the usbc connector pushes the i flash too far forward for a larger battery the bluetooth module um overlaps with the iflashboard but what you can do is you can get something like a dremel or an electric saw kind of thing and you can actually chop pcbs um if you tape it first and you just

take your time it's virtually impossible to damage the hardware like that i flash card there i removed two sd card slots and cut the wires to them on the pcb with a dremel and it works fine the first time it's super easy to do but the bluetooth module the first one i did actually stuffed up but what you can do it's very hard to see here is that you can actually just run a little tiny wire from where you've cut the tracks so you can even fix your mistakes if you stuff up and if you did think that this was hard to do or that you were worried about cutting tracks there is a hacking community

which is basically taking wii consoles taking the motherboard out of them chopping it up into a space about the size of my hand and then putting it into game boys like it's like chopping a motherboard is not a sin you can use it to basically fit a whole bunch more stuff in there but then you have the task of actually wiring the thing up and this will take time i think i spent a couple of days putting all these wires in and getting the length right now if you go down to somewhere like j car or you order online you can get some very very thin copper wire and this stuff is coated so you'll only

join where you've soldered it and you just run little wires to join the things um together now at the end of my slides i've got links to everything that i'm talking about i should have probably mentioned that at the beginning but there are links that you can basically take a screenshot and go nuts so the other thing is that you're going to cut holes in the case so for the usbc connector and also if you look at the ipod in the picture i've created a button for the bluetooth and a switch underneath it which is next to the blue light and the cool thing about this is that the ipod headphone jack actually has a pre-drilled hole at the

very back of it covered by a sticker and so if you remove that sticker and you put an led light at the back you can actually have the bluetooth indication light shining out through the headphone socket which is kind of cool because if using wireless headphones the headphone socket goes blue but if you plug headphones in they'll work just fine um so yeah let's see if i can show you here just hold down the button there we are so it's blinking away and turn it off by holding it down and there's also a switch to change it between receive and transmit and the reason why i added that switching is because that's how you remove pairings

so again ipods like this are incredibly difficult to open so do yourself a favor put all the buttons on the bluetooth receiver on the outside so when you lose the connection and the pairing you don't have to open your ipod to reset it very important the other thing to mention is is that if you hook the bluetooth receiver up to the battery inside the ipod it doesn't even need its own lithium-ion battery so when you charge the ipod you're actually charging the bluetooth receiver because it uses the same battery so you've done that it turns on the next thing you're going to want to do before you close it is you're going to want to sync some

music onto it and check everything works again for the third time these are hard things to open and i have damaged many many parts trying to open these ipods before so get the right tools you can go onto iflash's website and they've got a whole bunch of little shimmies and things to open up the ipods but anyway the point is here check your ipod works and everything that you've done works before you close it now when it comes to formatting an ipod on its first boot it will actually just format it to i think windows format and then you can sync it but if you've added usbc you might want to use it as an external

hard drive and if you want to use it as an external hard drive fat32 which is an older file system is not really going to cut it has a four gigabyte limit it's prone to failures not the best thing for moving files or storing files so if you use the tool like linux gparted you can actually re-partition the ipod's hard drive and you can create a fat fa2 petition at the front and whatever you want afterwards so for me i added an ncfs pass petition at the end so i can use it like a hard drive now the most important thing is if you're going to do this is when you're formatting fat32 there's an option to say

how big the clusters are for fat32 and you're going to want to use 64 kilobyte cluster sizes if you use anything smaller than that your ipod is going to run really really slow because it's going to take forever to read all the clusters to play music or to go the next thing if you make it larger than 64 clusters the ipod is going to start to have some defects show like a cover art is going to skip full chunks of the cover art or the song won't play because i believe that there's a bug in the ipod where when you use cluster sizes greater than 64k it actually overflows and it doesn't read enough data or it skips too far

ahead and so if you actually want to try and create a file system exploit for an ipod there might be stuff there again your target audience is probably not very big but then yeah you can literally have a you know a massive ipod with all your music on it bluetooth usbc and you can do it yourself it's not that hard um it'll take you time and patience but that's about it and if you do need help or you want some suggestions you can always reach out to me i've added all the email i'm sorry i've had all my contact details here as well as basically links to the individual things so there's a youtube video which kind of

talks about um adding usbc to an older ipod and they talk about basically buzzing around to find the connections there's a youtube video there that takes you through the entire process of adding the bluetooth module the other thing is that they don't add the switch or the blue led light but i would recommend doing both those things otherwise it's got links for what battery to buy what ipod to buy what the limitations are all your storage options whether you want to go with a ssd and burn a hole in the ground do you want to add a gigantic battery into it but yeah most importantly find yourself a project while you're in lockdown and learn some soldering skills

and modify some hardware thank you very much for your time

[Applause] such a great talk and i think it really it's to me anyway i think it really epitomizes what hacking is all about i think actually both talks tonight for me is is like the classic definition of hacking and you know creativity and ingenuity targeting some sort of thing i think it's so such great you know stuff to see and really inspiring i think i said this to you last night it's really inspiring to see this type of stuff and it makes me want to like immediately jump out and get a soldering iron and do something as cool as that because it's really nice to see uh there was one question actually i was actually sort of more

common than a question to be honest on the slack josh uh said the usbc to usb c cables if you connected cc1 and cc2 to 5.1 k resistors apparently you'll get usb c to usb c uh but it's such a yeah so this is a really good point um so i haven't done that so a usb-c the usb-c cable won't work in my ipod um but also that i didn't know this when i was doing it i just it worked with usb 2 so i kind of said yeah it works um when you do these projects you're going to miss stuff and you're going to you know make mistakes and it's fine because it's really cool to because if i

actually ever build up the courage to open my ipod again like i might actually go in and fix that um or maybe someone else will come along and build an even better one maybe an ipod with less uh war scars than uh my one has from opening and closing it so many times i don't think it's a bug i think it's a feature usb c usb a i think that's a feature for sure um what do you actually didn't think the dremel uh looked that bad actually or the the the drill hole for the the usb-c output or the usb port looked pretty good i had a video like a live video so you could

see like um all the dust i was breathing in and like the kind of off cuts you do the first time you know like you're gonna make mistakes but you can easily fix them with a little bit of wire and a little bit of soldering i think i've paid like reasonable money for electronics that look worse than what you did with your ipod to be honest i thought it was quite neat and the light in the uh the usb the bluetooth indicator in the in the port looks really good too yeah so if you do these mods you can actually use whatever color you want like you're not limited nice just a sort of a side track

question here out of curiosity what are your thoughts about usbc i mean it's one connector lots of cables is that a good thing or a bad thing because i don't know i gotta say like uh the different standards for usbc cables uh makes it very uh very confusing um like if you're an actual i kind of paid out apple a couple of times with their lightning connector but lightning connector is a lightning connector there's no versions there's no speeds to it like it is what it is basically in the tin the promise of usbc was that one cable to rule them all but at some point they're not going to have those usb 2 lines in the middle of

them because it's a legacy feature and then you have these extra pins that you're not using for anything so yeah it's it was a great idea and i'm like i think over the next you know five ten years uh it'll probably calm down a little bit in terms of the standard and usb cable work with everything um that being said one point i'd make is that uh i don't see apple putting a usbc in their phones anytime soon however for those who really want to give themselves a challenge they're you know it wouldn't be too bad to actually crack open an iphone grab a thunderbolt to sorry a lightning to usb-c cable take the chip out of it and see if

you can actually make a usb-c iphone before apple does like there's a challenge for the audience i'll leave that one to you pete a c sides or a b-sides talk next year perhaps awesome