alt Hacker NewsReverse engineering like this is black magic to me. The writeup is good. It's detailed and I could follow along with what the author was doing even though I'm too stupid to ever attempt something like this. Nice job author.
I liked bullet 2 in the Introduction.
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callc • yesterday at 7:57 PM
Take it one step at a time. I’ve had a fun time just intercepting the Bluetooth communication part for little devices.
Most of the time the protocols are not locked down, and if it’s a popular device chances are someone else already did it for you.
You can get help by decompiling the Android app for the device which should give more info about the content of the Bluetooth messages.
That’s the level I’m at right now. Oscilloscopes and all that look intimidating to me too!
Reverse engineering the way they do it is very satisfying and time consuming. If you want the same results but without the sweat, LLMs are the way to go now. They eat this kind of stuff for lunch. You could literally ask one for a table with all the CAN bus messages and it would figure it out.
I wrote a blog posts where I first did it the traditional way and then, a few months later, the lazy way: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/04/12/AMIQ-License-Key-Ge....