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Curiosities, personal notes and development log. Just pure IT, science and fun.

Hacking simple toy into frequency-aware animatronic Bluetooth speaker

Improved Billy Bass DIY kit

2024-11-08

Hacking a Big Mouth Billy Bass — a nostalgic toy that some of us could get as a gift from uncle from US - into an advanced, frequency-aware animatronic device was both a technical challenge and a delight. In this project, I transformed this singing fish into an interactive Bluetooth speaker that analyzes audio input and moves its head, tail, and mouth according to specific frequency bands. The result? A speaker that doesn't just play audio but reacts to it with precision, offering synchronized movements that make it seem alive.

But why? The inspiration for this project came from my nephew, who was fascinated by fishes and asked me if we could make a toy come to life in a more dynamic way. While there are numerous DIY projects that repurpose Big Mouth Billy Bass, many miss the desired result of toy feeling the rhytm. Most existing examples either offer basic mouth movement or simple audio playback without nuanced synchronization - only depending on current audio volume. Unfortunately, this is not the case for creating anything resembling dancing and singing. That is why I created this project from scratch and used audio spectrum analysis to achieve better...

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Hijacking GPS: The modern threat of GPS spoofing

Stealthy manipulation of navigation systems

2024-10-09

Global Positioning System (GPS) has become an integral part of our daily lives, guiding everything from smartphones to critical infrastructure systems like aviation, military operations, and global shipping. It's one of those invisible technologies that we take for granted—until it goes wrong. However, as the use of GPS continues to expand, so do the potential threats. One particularly insidious threat is GPS spoofing, a technique that allows an attacker to manipulate or falsify GPS signals. With the ongoing geopolitical tension, notably the Russia-Ukraine conflict, GPS spoofing has become a tool in modern warfare, enabling adversaries to disrupt, deceive, or mislead the positioning systems of their opponents.

This blog post explores the vulnerabilities of GPS technology and dives deeply into the concept of GPS spoofing. Drawing from the "All Your GPS Are Belong To Us: Towards Stealthy Manipulation of Road Navigation Systems" whitepaper (27th Usenix Security 2019), we’ll discuss how spoofing attacks are executed, their potential consequences, and why this issue remains relevant in today’s world of heightened global conflicts.


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Julian 'jul3x' Prolejko

Software Engineer

Software engineer specializing in creating low-latency systems and scalable distributed systems. Throughout my programming journey, I have worked on projects involving both low-level robotic applications and web systems, as well as automation.

My coding journey started in the web development industry. Since then I gained extensive experience in designing IT solutions and user interfaces. For over 10 years, I have been delivering modern software and customer-friendly web applications.

You can find contact details inside this personal portfolio which documents some of the projects that I created and contributed to during my lifetime.