alt Hacker NewsI can’t wait till somebody figures out how to reverse engineer these with a LLM so we can just sync the scale data ourselves. I purchased one of these devices, but I am somewhat regretting my decision now.
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I don't have the scale, but I got the protocol for the watch and it'll probably be similar enough.
Been using my implementation exclusively for months, seems fine.
I'm coming to the conclusion that my life is improved the more I can leave these technologies alone.
Used to be a thing before LLMs too.
Here is a starting point. It includes a link to instructions on how to reverse engineer a Bluetooth scale[0], and it looks like someone dumped some data already.
I've had pretty good luck using Google Appscript to either access web APIs or screenscrape, then parse into a Google Sheet (which I either use as-is or as the source to populate a web app).
We need an open firmware for these scales.
I just need a scale that syncs with my phone, and none of those subscriptions.
I give it at most a week. People freed the Whoop pretty quickly. I mean, you could probably do it yourself if you have the time and an LLM, it's probably not that locked down.
Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058850 - October 2026
Pretty sure it's already possible. I have a small service running on homelab that syncs all the withings data to garmin. Has needed no attention in years and just works.
I'm not as optimistic. I think we're in a very small golden window and once companies catch on that reverse engineering is taking off in a big way, they're going to panic and start demanding cryptographically-sealed binaries with remote attestation everywhere. And they'll probably get it, because what the consumer wants barely matters anymore.
I can't help but feel that something soon gonna break, and break big. Like, the decompilation stuff either gonna get criminalized, or forbidden in training, or I don't know. Current state of affairs became super imbalanced, where I can decompile 400k+ lines big game in a weekend and rip it's engine; or, as pointed in sister thread, as someone cloned music processor device in 2 hours.
The question is who and when first blinks.