I just found out some interesting reverse-engineering hack related to Helsinki bus stop displays. Tapping Data From Radio-Controlled Bus Stop Displays tells that a couple of weeks ago hacker Oona Räisänen told about finding a 16 kbps data stream on FM broadcast frequencies, and her suspicion was that it’s being used by the public transit display system in Helsinki, Finland. Now it’s time to find out the truth.
Decoding radio-controlled bus stop displays article tells how this IBus system made by the Swedish company Axentia works. It shows what data is send and how it can be decoded. Here’s one “bus & destination packets” packet after dissection from the article.
Terrific reverse engineering!
The same hacker had also other interesting hacking articles worth to check out..
If you are interesting on more on Helsinki public transportation displays related hacking, check my Assembly summer 2013 posting that has video that shows how an old Finnish metro station display can be hacked to computer art platform.
2 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
The same hacker continues public transportation related hacks:
Headerless train announcements
http://www.windytan.com/2014/06/headerless-train-announcements.html
The Finnish state railway company just changed their automatic announcement voice, discarding old recordings from trains. It could be a good time for some data dumpster diving for the old ones, don’t you think?
The audio files are headerless; there is no explicit information about the format, sample rate or sample size anywhere.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mystery signal from a helicopter
http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-helicopter.html