Summary
Ukraine’s military intelligence reported finding Western-made components inside Russian decoy drones, used in recent swarm attacks to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.
Dubbed “Parody,” these decoys are cheaper than Iran’s Shahed-136 drones but can mimic their radar signatures, creating fake targets to distract defenses.
Russia reportedly launched over 2,000 drones last month, half of which were decoys, with some crashing in Moldova, raising regional security concerns.
Despite sanctions, Western technology continues to appear in Russian weapons, complicating efforts to restrict Moscow’s drone capabilities.
I mean … of course they did. I’m sure there are plenty of wartime purposes for general use and consumer electronics parts.
True, as seen by Russian fighter pilots literally taping consumer GPS units to the cockpit, but Russia is under sanctions and should not be receiving any silicon for general or consumer use either
Actual weapons get laundered through third party nations; I have to think that consumer electronics would be vastly easier to do the same with.
Yeah you can literally reprogram microcontrollers out of smart bulbs and use them to fly drones or guide missiles. General purpose CPU means general purpose CPU.
I was going to say “doubt” because I’ve seen various smart bulb development prototypes (ancient technology by now), but then it occurred to me that once you nix the parts that drive LEDs from AC, you got yourself a nice lil mc board. With some fancy soldering (better than anything I could do) you could probably get access to a couple extra pins. If you can get access to whatever reprogramming interface it has on just one, youve now got yourself a fligh controller. You’ll need a radio, but I imagine Russia has something for that, or maybe they have something fancy with whatever the 2.4Ghz radio provides.
Then you need PWM signals for motor control and you need an accelerometer and gyro. Every phone and your grandmother has those. Program in your flight software to fly the drone the way you want with all the sensors and radios. Then you just need a battery adapter and escs for the BLDCs.
If you get a shipment of 10k bulbs and have a process for extracting it - you got up to 10k drone brains.
I actually cracked one open once a couple years ago, forgot which brand, but there was literally just a regular old ESP8266 module soldered onto the board. All you need is a USB to TTL serial adapter to reflash it, and then use a hobby knife to cut and isolate the GPIO pins you’re going to use.
Edit: Better yet, if I was a sanctioned rogue state, I’d use what little PCB fab capabilities I have left to just have boards ready to go to drop in the controller from the bulbs. It’d just take seconds with a hot air station.
Yup. They’ve been doing this at scale by cannibalizing home appliances: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/russia-using-refrigerator-parts-build-missiles-western-sanctions-impact-on-economy-reports-2384642-2023-05-26 (Sorry for the shitty site, better sources were paywalled.)
Yeah, you’re not wrong
The point is that there’s sanctions, and the sanctions are supposed to prevent those parts from getting into Russia. It’s not surprising to a lot of us that sanctions are ineffective at anything other than hurting the general population, but it’s good to report it and have that data point.