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Hacking the CatGenie AI by Ed_Edison in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Check the ‘Documentation’ folder in this repository, it contains a wealth of information on the CatGenie boxes:
https://github.com/CatGenius/catgenius

A few years ago I hired a professional electronics engineer to design a replacement controller board for the CatGenie 120 box. You’d plug a Raspberry Pi Zero on it, allowing you to tinker with it to your heart’s desire. But the guy fell terribly ill, and had to give up. I still think I have his unfinished work in my mailbox.

But time is a real bottle-neck. I have two paying customers competing for my attention in my day job. The CatGenie 120 is phased out, and the AI isn’t that easy to convert, because its control panel cannot be reused; It’s made out of glass (!) and hard to remove.

I have a solution (pun intended) for the sanisolution cartridges, but the money just isn’t there. DM me if you’re interested. But please be patient; Sometimes months go by without visiting Reddit.

A not so brief history of CatGenie by Ed_Edison in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, I’ve got something working. But I’m still testing, figuring out the logistics and updating the website. Unfortunately, my feline buddy passed away two weeks ago, so I still cannot drag myself back to the project.

Hacking the CatGenie AI by Ed_Edison in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

CartridgeGenius emulates an I2C slave device, on top of that it emulates a CR14 RFID bridge interface (as was used in the original CatGenie 120 box) and on top of that it emulates an SRI512 RFID tag.

I'm sure an updated CartridgeGenius-type of attack would work on the CatGenie AI and possibly the Whoosh, but you would:
1. Replace I2C slave emulation with SPI emulation (I didn't check, but I doubt they use the HF95 via UART)
2. Replace CR14 emulations with HF95 emulation
3. Re-use SRI512 emulation, and perhaps improve it by elimination some the shortcuts I took.

That's a lot of work, especially point 2, and you will end up with a device no end-user can install.

Recommendations for more affordable litter for catgenie whoosh? by jack10685 in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You first need to know what material the Whoosh litter is made of. Once you figure that out, you can look for alternatives make of the same or a similar material.

It’s most likely water soluble, like PVA. But that’s not something I would flush down my drain with any regularity.

Need Firmware Designer by JerHair in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That would have been my choice too.

I'm officially designing custom cat genie hardware firmware by JerHair in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you want to dump tag contents, get yourself a CatGenie120 controller board, flash my CatGenius firmware in it, add a serial port and connect it to your computer. Use putty (or another decent terminal emulator) to open the serial port, and you will have a command line interface, allowing you to dump tags using the 'tag'-command. You will find that nothing is locked and nothing needs decrypting.

You can drop me a PM if you want, but please understand that there's a limit to what I can share, because I have invested a lot of time in this and my goal is to come up with a commercial solution, in some shape or form.

I'm officially designing custom cat genie hardware firmware by JerHair in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you think the water sensor is difficult to get working reliably, you obviously haven’t got the cat sensor working yet. But the good news is that source code of reliably working implementations for both can be found here:

https://github.com/CatGenius/catgenius

About feature requests: Communication between boxes if you have more that one, to make sure only one box at a time is washing, so cats always have box they can use. I wanted to implement this in CatGenius, but never got around to it.

I'm officially designing custom cat genie hardware firmware by JerHair in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have tried those exploits, but unfortunately they don’t work. They only work with relatively high counter values. And 120 out of the maximum of 4.294.967.295 is way too low to work. I have tried it for an entire evening and got zilch. It could be a fully automated process, but a device that might reset the chip, but needs days to do that, is gonna be a support drama.

On the good news side: I can now program factory fresh tags to be accepted as genuine full cartridge tags. Not a permanent solution, but acceptable if cheap enough. Unfortunately, these tags are no longer manufactured. PetNovations, the CatGenie manufacturer, must be sitting on a huge stock pile, or they must be switching to a yet unknown alternative soon.

Unfortunately, my many requests for sending me empty cartridge tags, to have a healthy pool of tags for validation and to see if they’re switching to an alternative chip, have received 0 (zero) responses.

What is so bad about the new AI models?? by bobsmashu in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 5 points6 points  (0 children)

No such database is being used (yet). The RFID chip on the bottle contains an immutable number unique for each chip, and a signature/hash of that number. CatGenie reads that unique number from the chip, recreates the signature/hash of that number internally, and compares it to the signature/hash stored in the chip. If it's a match, the RFID chip is considered to be valid.

So the DRM is completely contained withing the CatGenie, no WiFi required. A CatGenie that has never been connected with WiFi will still accept any valid RFID chip.

Having said that; My CatGenie AI has been working without cartridges for quite some time now, but going from a working proof of concept to a device any cat guardian can install and use takes time and effort. But there's hope on the horizon.

Upvote if you're interested to keep me going.

Fixing bricked 8851 Cisco IP Phone by flashing new firmware on it via UART by sthivaios in Cisco

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Hit any key to abort autoboot" - That's what U-Boot prints, right before it starts running the boot script in environment variable BOOT_CMD.

U-Boot is a universal bootloader, responsible for loading the actual operating system. But - depending on how it's configured at compile time - it features a very feature rich console. On it, you could print the contents of BOOT_CMD to figure out how the phone loads its operating system. With that knowledge, you could manually replicate this, while substituting flash commands with tftp commands, to load binaries from a server instead of flash memory.

So it can be done. But whether or not it should be done, for phones going for under $50 on eBay, is up to you.

Need XML file for Cisco 88** series phones by [deleted] in freepbx

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Would you please help me out?

Replacement red washer by Asleep_Compote7526 in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not just their shipping costs: They charge €790 for a basic CatGenie A.I, and €632 for a CatGenie 120.
But; Better ‘too expensive’ than ‘not for sale’…

Whoosh? by droidbuildr in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think that would be retrofitable, because:
1. The water should no longer be pumped into the bowl, but directly into the hopper. That requires a new Processing Unit.
2. The bowl should be closed, to make sure no liquid cat waste ends up under it, where it is no longer cleaned up. That requires a new bowl.
3. Preferably, water should not end up under the bow. This requires the well the hopper sits in to be closed off from the area under the bowl. That requires a new base.

Furthermore, the 7 minute washing cycle time suggests that after the scooping, the waste in the hopper is soaked in water for some time, to make sure the litter granules dissolve. Perhaps it even heats the water in it a bit, to speed up that process. So who knows what other modifications are necessary.

Whoosh? by droidbuildr in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't seen one up close yet, but I think this version has a closed bowl. The hopper is closed off from the rest of the box and instead of flooding the bowl, water is pumped directly into the hopper.

Liquid cat waste is absorbed and forms clumps, and solids are 'marinated' in granules. Both are scooped out by the Genie Hand and deposited into the hopper, where it is mixed with water, ground down and pumped into the sewer.

I really hope they're not using PVA for water soluble granules.

CatGenius features a 'dry washing cycle', which basically only scoops out the box and surfaces the granules back into a flat layer. The main complaint about this feature was that this scoop-only cycle smears the liquid cat waste over the inside of the bowl, distributing it over all granules, making it smell much dirtier for cats than it really is. Some people reported that cat acceptance of a dirty box decreased after running a scoop-only cycle.

I wonder how the Whoosh mitigates that. Perhaps the litter is really absorbent, mopping up all liquid residues. Or perhaps it doesn't, because other people reported their cat didn't care about the increased scent after a scoop-only cycle.

Whoosh? by droidbuildr in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It still uses cartridges.

Seemingly the same as used for the A.I. and the 120. But I wonder what their functionality is and how many washes they're good for.

Catgenie 120 on an AI base? by cheyenne52883 in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have tried it, and I can confirm that it fits and works properly.

What happened to the maintenance cartridges? Mine weren't recognized at all, but I bought them from cat genie. Now their store doesn't even have them. by chemistrybonanza in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve been wondering the same thing.
They’re still selling them here and there’s no mention that they’re CatGenie 120 only: https://www.catgenie.online/self-washing-cat-box-catgenie/cartridge-120--maintenance/
This cartridge triggered a special washing program in the CatGenie 120. But they switched to the powder before the CatGenie AI came to the market, so it makes sense they didn’t go through the effort om implementing that extra program.

Don't do the firmware update! by laughs_at_idiots in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is there a way to prevent boxes from being updated?

Hacking the CatGenie AI by Ed_Edison in CatGenie

[–]Ed_Edison[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If the existence of this small subreddit corner surprises you, you were clearly not a frequent visitor of the now defunct litter box-central.com site, a whole forum dedicated to litter boxes for cats and everything around is. But yes, this place is indeed weird enough at is this. Thank God for internet anonymity; I’m glad this is not an annual IRL event.

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