Unlocking a locked/deactivated e-waste Cricut Maker

I was hoping this would be a hack that repurposed the unit to work standalone.

Getting the unit to work again in the Cricut "ecosystem" just means Cricut can disable it later when they catch on.

Companies that "lock" or otherwise brick viable hardware as part of the business model (I'm thinking about Sonos here, too) are really terrible. People shouldn't be rewarding them by buying their garbage to begin with.

If anyone has an old Silhouette vinyl cutter sitting around gathering dust, there's an actively maintained open source Inkscape plugin that lets you "print" your design straight to the cutter: https://github.com/fablabnbg/inkscape-silhouette

I wrote about it a couple years ago: https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/June/diy-vinyl-cut-mo...

I have a silhouette cameo pro 4 (and love it), and have been wondering around similar things. The Cameo can only be controlled via the provided software, or a couple proprietary plugins for popular design software.

The provided software is clunky, and the plugins suck. I’ve been building an app for designing stickers, and what I really want is to either be able to drive the Cameo from the app directly, or output a design file in a format that can be loaded straight into the software to start cutting.

The thing I’m stuck on is… how do people reverse engineer these devices protocols, without fear of bricking the device? My understanding is that reverse engineering like this is a lot of “try shit and see if it works”. It seems to me that a few wrong commands could get the cameo in some irrecoverable state. Obviously that’s not a risk I’m willing to take on a machine I use very regularly.

No checksumming on the serial number packet makes this kind of proxy trivial. Using an RP2040 as a USB man-in-the-middle is a clever and cheap fix.

Just a PSA to anybody considering buying a new cricut:

They are cool machines mechanically, but the software is an absolute nightmare, DO NOT BUY.

Source: i bought one. Regret sunk in the moment i tried to do anything even slightly interesting. This isn’t a bambulabs situation where it’s mostly a philosophical objection to a closed ecosystem. It’s bad software that makes it hard or impossible to use the machine except in a very narrow set of ways.

I’ve not firsthand used any of the competing machines (silhoutte, et al) but i hear they are a bit better - and i don’t know how they could be worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricut#Controversies

Also, it's a very fun article to read.

I see so many of these at resale stores for next to nothing. What a shame.

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