Erik Bosman Takes Aim at Hollywood Hacking with Photogenic, Animated Hex Dump Display Board

PhD student Erik Bosman has addressed the biggest problem with the representation of hacking in TV and film — that showing anything realistic would be boring — with a custom-built board that aims to make hex dumps somewhat more photogenic.

Almost universally, hacking scenes in films and on TV are played for visual effect rather than absolute accuracy. For every time nmap shows up in The Matrix Reloaded you've got the eye-bending fractals of Hackers or the two-to-a-keyboard harmony of NCIS.

"I have retroactively fixed everybody's complaint about movie hacking/reverse engineering not being realistic," Bosman boasts via Twitter. His solution? A custom-built board constructed from 416 two-digit 14-segment displays capable of showing both the hexadecimal values themselves and a more-or-less readable interpretation of their ASCII decoded characters — a classic hex dump — and driven by a series of STMicroelectronics STM32F030F4 microcontrollers.

Where Bosman's board differs from just looking at the same information on a screen is that it is capable of animations: The board is programmed to project the location of each display segment onto a three-dimensional plane then use that to brighten and dim particular segments in turn according to drawn shapes — circles and spirals, in the published demo.

Bosman has published the PCB design, firmware, and supporting software to his GitHub repository, though warns that the project isn't quite finished yet.