Hack the Dex

Inspiration

Pokemon's Pokedex. We feel a great sense of nostalgia for the DS handhelds, so we built around this.

What it does

• Scan a new hackers' badge
• Save their contact information
• Take a picture with/of your new friend
• Let them personalize their "Friend Card" with a drawing

How we built it

• BlocksDS for building the bare-metal firmware
  • allows access to peripherals of the device
• Python webserver to decode the HackTheNorth QR code scanned, parse HTN website, and pass over
• JSON storage on DSi for plaintext archiving of profiles

Challenges we ran into

• Competing with Badge functionality
  • Already had connection between hackers, which changed our scope and novelty
• Bypassing login for HackTheNorth to access badge information and scrape with webscraper
• Closed source firmware for the badge leading to scope change
  • LUA based SDK limited access to HTTP/BLE and external API calls on the ESP32
  • Could have been fixed by flashing our own firmware on the badges, but that means not being able to participate in the Goose Games!
• DSi and DSiXL hardware issues

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• All working peripherals we wanted
  • camera
  • touchscreen
  • buttons
• Desired output from the beginning
• Lives forever on our DS
• Good memory of HackTheNorth

What we learned

• Baremetal programming
• Ngrok tunnels
• Sending TCP packets
• WiFi chip architecture differences in hardware between DSi and DSiXL

What's next for Hack the Dex

• Use more peripherals such as the accelerometer, mic
• New firmware on the badge board to directly connect

Built With

• blocksds
• c
• ngrok
• pillow
• playwright
• python