Adam Łoboda Clones a 433MHz Garage Key with the Universal Radio Hacker and a Simple Arduino Sketch
Rather than shelling out for an official copy, Łoboda opted to make his own — for less than $5 in parts.
Adam Łoboda needed a spare key for his remotely-openable garage door — and rather than buy one from the manufacturer, decided to clone his original using the tiny DigiSpark and an FS1000A transmitter alongside the Universal Radio Hacker (URH) software suite.
"My garage keys do not have any rolling code and encryption so the reverse engineering was fast and simple (something like two hours of work)," Łoboda explains in the introduction to his step-by-step tutorial video on the subject. "In the video I have used Linux PC with RTL SDR dongle installed and [the] set of tools Universal Radio Hacker to record and decode garage key fob transmission on [the] ISM band."
"[A] Linux PC is not required, you can do all these steps on Windows PC or Mac (requirement is to have RTL-SDR dongle, URH and Arduino IDE installed). After decoding the signal I was able to replicate 1:1 set of pulses and pauses within my simple Arduino sketch."
The replica transmitter is built around the Arduino-compatible DigiSpark development board and a low-cost FS1000A transmitter. A simple Arduino sketch takes care of the transmission, using timing information captured from the genuine remote using the Universal Radio Hacker. Had the manufacturer added any kind of playback protection, the process would have been more challenging — but without it, cloning the key proved simple.
The full tutorial is now available on Łoboda's YouTube channel, while the Arduino sketch has been published on GitHub under an unspecified license.
