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Show HN: Hacking a $20 4G wireless hotspot into a texting device

bkovac.github.io

31–39 of 39 posts

Re: Show HN: Hacking a $20 4G wireless hotspot into a texting device

#31

I often ditch my phone and carry my hotspot device for my internet. The only drawback is that for viewing my texts and OTPs i end up putting the sim in my phone or opening up the web interface on my laptop. This seems to work very well as a dumbphone per se.

How do you check sms/OTP/text using web interface on your laptop?

yeah my vendor's dongle has this specific feature. A light also turns ON on the modem when SMS is received.

Re: Show HN: Hacking a $20 4G wireless hotspot into a texting device

#33

This is really nice! It so happens that I’ve just bought a $10 4G dongle [1], guess I’ll have to check what’s inside now :-) [1]: like this: https://img.joomcdn.net/ea91b4418997d83d802339fad0bbcf878b9d... --- Aside, but it appears some MSM8916-based dongles run Android UI despite having no display: https://github.com/u0d7i/uz801#screenshots

it's most likely UZ801 (mentioned in the article)

Re: Show HN: Hacking a $20 4G wireless hotspot into a texting device

#36
post #22

It would be pretty cool to put Hermes Agent or some agent system on that thing, assuming the OpenStick build has enough RAM/storage. That would be fire.

Truly, I couldn't imagine a worse platform to put a coding agent on. What even would be the point? It's got less than 512GB of RAM, no package manager, and virtually no storage.

Hermes is not a coding agent.

Re: Show HN: Hacking a $20 4G wireless hotspot into a texting device

#37

This is really nice! It so happens that I’ve just bought a $10 4G dongle [1], guess I’ll have to check what’s inside now :-) [1]: like this: https://img.joomcdn.net/ea91b4418997d83d802339fad0bbcf878b9d... --- Aside, but it appears some MSM8916-based dongles run Android UI despite having no display: https://github.com/u0d7i/uz801#screenshots

Postmarketos works well on those and they have lots of info and links. [1]

My biggest tip is to carefully back up every partition of the original firmware - there are many many seemingly identical variants and if you hose your particular baseband components you will lose your cellular functionality.

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Zhihe_series_LTE_dongles_...

Re: Show HN: Hacking a $20 4G wireless hotspot into a texting device

#38

This is really nice! It so happens that I’ve just bought a $10 4G dongle [1], guess I’ll have to check what’s inside now :-) [1]: like this: https://img.joomcdn.net/ea91b4418997d83d802339fad0bbcf878b9d... --- Aside, but it appears some MSM8916-based dongles run Android UI despite having no display: https://github.com/u0d7i/uz801#screenshots

it's most likely UZ801 (mentioned in the article)

It’s a weird one!

  [ro.build.description]: [msm8916_32_512-userdebug 4.4.4 KTU84P eng.huanghonghuan.20250226 test-keys]
  [ro.build.sw.custom.version]: [UFI003S_V03_ZX_DD_250226]
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