alt Hacker NewsWe need to free up Bosch systems. They use lots of open source libs, but they close the whole chain (like spare batteries) so that you cannot plug external batteries from other suppliers.
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Pretty much anything hardware based is like this. Everything is 100% closed source and bolted down such that inspecting it is outright impossible without extensive reverse engineering.
I took a look into the batteries for the ebike systems, they have some sort of AES based pairing and the chips are read protected. You probably can dump the firmware from the update packages for the things. (maybe some hw exploitation stuff as well?) I did a thing where I put their battery controller on an after market battery with a divisor and it started and paired, but for some reason blew up afterwards.
I now realize it would be easier to write the whole thing wholesale, but.. uhh, it's no small feat, and I have a job soooo...
Bosch should open their shit, it might save them, because it seems the chinese with Avinox will eat their dinner in a couple of years. They seem to be pretty litigious, they went after a forum that documented initiatives to reverse (well, they also hosted pirated diagnostics sw but.. yeah)
Like Apple who used BSD but then closed the whole chain?
At https://infinite-battery.com (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) our battery is compatible with Bosch systems
Having been on the flip side of this divide in the past, there really are a lot of potential safety and reliability problems when using random third party versions of components. While I'm sure there are strong financial incentives to constrain supply, there are also some other strong reasons as well.
Also it's very expensive to actually make an ecosystem compared to a close one. The best way to incentivize manufacturers to do it is by creating a competing product that is open and having that differentiating feature drive sales away. That's generally the approach that works best.