As a technology and fashion contributor for NOTANON I am often tasked with finding the most interesting piece of tech for our unique audience to learn about and hopefully get their paws on. After hitting the conference circuit, the Dark Web, and my local hacker watering hole, I think I have found this month’s winner. The “WiFi Nugget” by HakCat. This device isn’t just another gadget in the increasingly crowded “is this a toy or is this a tool” tech market. Like others in the space the WiFi Nugget is unassuming and looks like a badgelife trinket or some kind of tomodachi-like maker project. Behind its cute PCB microcontroller lurks a very serious piece of technology, capable of a deadly number of cable free networking sins.
At its core, the WiFi Nugget is a portable WiFi education, reconnaissance, analysis, threat detection, and yes hacking – tool. At the heart of the WiFi Nugget is the ESP8266 microcontroller by Espressif Systems, an amazingly inexpensive and capable TCP/IP networking microchip. The WiFi Nugget can host web apps, apps can be flashed over to it, modules can be added to it. It can create spoofed WiFi networks, wardriving, deAuth attacks, and a lot of the offensive WiFi “hacker parlor tricks” that can get you into enough “good trouble”. The chip itself can run Arduino and Micro Python.
HakCat has done something impressive with the WiFi Nugget which has lead to a lot of community support, that is made all the information and materials on it easy to get your hands on. With the Bill of Materials, Gerber, code, firmware. and time you can head over to your PCB custom manufacturer of choice and produce your own to play with or put one together from scratch. For those looking to learn more about soldering, flashing, and programming without having to do the procurement on parts, you can pick up a “solder yourself” WiFi Nugget kit for $69 USD and build it yourself.
So, why the WiFi Nugget? You can order a completely assembled one for $75 USD over at https://retia.io/ . At that price you really can’t go wrong, the device is small enough to carry in a pocket, purse, or pin to your NOTANON hoodie of choice. To learn more about it and the community of enthusiasts that support it check out, https://nugget.dev/