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Sunk cost fallacy and motivation

A project log for RPi Zero WiFi-Enabled Hardware Password Manager

Codename Hardpass: A Password Manager on the Raspberry Pi Zero...suffering featuritis.

girgir 01/30/2018 at 15:095 Comments

Oh boy, here we go again: an update.

I haven't progressed a lot in the past year with this project. A big part of it was that I wasn't able to get the smart card interface to work. I've spent countless hours planning, designing and otherwise working on hardpass-sci and was in the end defeated by the awful driver situation of the chip I settled on.
I was originally drawn to the Philips/NXP TDA8029 because I've seen a github repository containing the driver for it. I didn't do much research into the driver, and assumed it was OK. However, after getting the hardware ready the true state of the driver came apparent. Not only was the Philips' driver written for an extremely old version of PCSC, it was kept outside of the main PCSC distribution, requiring manual updates to it to keep working. Which of course didn't happen. Then, larytet on github did some changes, the commits were helpfully labelled "Update." After getting in touch with them, they weren't quite sure what they were doing the three years ago when the "updates" were commited, and the driver's implementation wasn't fully finished either.

Well, there goes that into the drain. 

Not wanting to write my efforts off as waste, I tried to keep working on the TDA8029, but my motivation was pretty gone.

By sheer luck I found out about the Microchip SEC1210 -- another RS232/UART Smart card interface chip! And guess what: It's driver is in mainline PCSC since last May!

The documentation around this chip is quite nice: I've found the schematics for the evaluation board right on microchip's website, and got to work on implementing a PCB. Right after, I sent the boardfiles to @oshpark and I'm now waiting like a small child on christmas eve for them to arrive.

The SEC1210 is only available in a QFN package -- and I don't have a hot air gun or a reflow oven, so we'll see how that turns out :S (any tips appreciated!)

the pcbs are marked version 0.2.4 -- if this turns out well, the sec1210 will mark the beginning of hardpass 0.3!

Discussions

adhiraaj.ghosh wrote 08/04/2020 at 17:16 point

Hi, update...I made it work.

  Are you sure? yes | no

gir wrote 08/04/2020 at 17:30 point

made what work? the sec1210?

  Are you sure? yes | no

adhiraaj.ghosh wrote 08/04/2020 at 17:36 point

Yes. Your design works. I made a custom board for myself and tested it. However I am facing an issue that my rpi doesn't boot with the hat plugged on....rather I have to hotplug it to make it work. Don't know what went wrong

  Are you sure? yes | no

adhiraaj.ghosh wrote 08/06/2020 at 18:41 point

Update works like charm with Pi3B+

Pi4 has some  PMIC chip issues

  Are you sure? yes | no

adhiraaj.ghosh wrote 04/20/2020 at 08:42 point

So did the SEC1210 work as intended ? Is this chip suitable for all PCSCD functions including key authentication stored in the smartcard ?

  Are you sure? yes | no