alt Hacker NewsWhile I empathize with your feelings about lock-in, I encourage you to see that we live in an amazingly empowering era. I would wager that with $20 in credits for the LLM flavor of the week and and an equally expensive BLE-to-USB dongle (try the nRF52840 dongle), you will have the protocol reverse-engineered overnight. BLE protocols are often very low-hanging fruit for this type of effort.
Yes, it's annoying this stuff isn't open source from the get-go, but it has never been easier to open hardware up for yourself and others.
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Is it really as easy as you say? I have one of these Casio watches and plenty of spare Claude credits. Wouldn’t mind doing this but no idea where to begin.
ble is just transport layer, if the actual data is encrypted, you can get nothing.
One of our device FW at first transmit raw data through gatt service, then folk at gadget bridge reverse engineer it, which does not sound good to stakeholder, so we have to encrypt the data between phone-device.
Having the LLM run the proprietary app through ghidra (which I think even has an MCP now), would likely give it some useful clues too
Q: How can we achieve world peace?
HN: I'd wager that with $20 in LLM tokens ...
Cracks me up every time lol
+1000.
There should be bounties for open sourcing drivers/apps like these and generally making 'clean'/better interfaces to hardware devices, now that it's so much easier.
Claude Code reverse engineered cheap (Android only) usb and wifi endoscopes here, wrote/flashed/hardware-in-the-loop developed python+arduino libraries, etc.
It's a completely new world.
@wpm, happy to fund the nRF52840 dongle if you want to try this + release code!