r/hacking • u/hawaii_brian • 5d ago
Question Best Hacking Toys Under $25
Looking to gift my team something fun but have a budget for $25 per team member. What cool toys do yall recommend?
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u/tylenol3 5d ago
A CYD (cheap yellow display) can be a lot of fun. CYD is a generic term for an ESP32 with 2.8” touchscreen, but there are other varieties available. If you get one of the classic** **ESP32-2432S028R boards, it can be used to run security auditing tools like GhostESP or Bruce.
There’s also the Lilygo T-Dongle (S3 or preferably C5) that can be used with USB Army Knife or Ghost to act as a badUSB / Rubber Ducky style device as well as a wireless hacking tool.
Both of these are less than $25 where I live, and our prices tend to run at least 2x US prices.
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u/TheTribunalChat 5d ago
I would also like to add that the lilygo dongle can flash biscuit, so you can wardrive, find flock cameras, axon cameras, etc. You can also deauth and do some BTE attacks. Very fun little thing you can plug directly through your phone and control through the app
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u/tylenol3 4d ago
Thank you, I knew there was another big obvious project I was missing! I haven’t tried Biscuit personally so it slipped my mind; I’ve got an S3 with a pigtail antenna that’s just sitting around waiting for a new project and you’ve inspired me to give it a reflash
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u/hawaii_brian 5d ago
I was looking at the s3 as I think it would be the easiest one to source right now. I know the pico pi are impossible to find so trying to get 20 of them would be out of the question.
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u/tylenol3 4d ago
The S3 is a ripper of a chip, and the only real downside vs the C5 that you only get 2.4ghz wifi.
Honestly I prefer the ESP32 to the RP2040/RP2350 that’s in the Pi Pico for this sort of stuff, hands down. The RP chips are perfect if you’re only doing USB HID stuff (emulating keyboards, gamepads, MIDI, etc) but the ESP32 has wifi and BTLE natively and way more memory (16Mb flash and onboard PSRAM in the case of the Lilygo).
The T-Dongle is a great choice, but there are lots of similar ESP32-based devices from heaps of vendors that can go as low as few dollars. You don’t even need a display for most of the cool hacking tools, it’s just a nice bonus. An ESP32-S3 dev board will run GhostESP, Biscuit, Bruce, etc in headless mode just fine. Just do a search on Amazon for “ESP32S3” and you’ll find a wealth of variety— LilyGo is solid but so are Waveshare, Freenove, and Elecrow.
A word of caution, though: if you are thinking of a model with a display and a particular firmware, check the project website for compatibility. There are lots of CYD-style devices that (while really awesome) don’t use the same display drivers as the “classic” CYD so they won’t run those projects in GUI-mode.
I started getting into microcontrollers more heavily when SBCs like the Raspberry Pi started getting stupid expensive and it’s an incredible space with so many cool projects being developed. The newer chips like the ESP32-P4 and (brand new) S31 are getting incredibly powerful— I think it’s going to quickly replace a lot of the stuff people were turning to Pis for previously. Small, cheap, and low power, and easy to get started writing code. I would be thrilled to get one as a work gift.
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u/expressly_ephemeral 4d ago
Would they like this?
https://www.lockpickworld.com/products/23pc-goso-lock-pick-set
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u/hawaii_brian 3d ago
I requested this on the list, figured it might work we’ll see what happens. Gave a list of 5 items
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u/Immediate_Menu507 5d ago
Seeed Xiao ESP32C5 with a male to male usb-c. Flash it with Biscuit and download the Biscuit phone app. Under $20.
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u/DysphoricMania 5d ago
can you point me towards a tutorial or what to Google to understand what your talking about?
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u/freedomcoke 5d ago
not sure of what you mean by "hacking" but i recently picked this up, and sorry, not under $25 but almost.
it's a fun little tool nonetheless.
you could incorporate a company logo on the display and have it do a variety of scripted functions
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u/purplepashy 5d ago
Raspberry pi.
RTL-SDR.
LoRa.