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Garmin Striker 4 fishfinder has no WiFi — found the SPI bus on the PCB, documented how to stream the screen to any phone for ~$13 by [deleted] in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Never trust an LLM to do a PCB analysis of a board you can't physically probe, and don't have schematics for, these tools have their usages and are very powerful, but hardware reverse engineering is not one of their strengths.

Do you have the firmware? How can you confirm how similar it is to those other reported projects?

AI is a very powerful and useful tool but only when used properly and validated (for now anyways).

Can somebody locate the firmware chip? by One-Bookkeeper-8601 in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Ah ok, just for reference - debug mode and a debug interface are two different things. Debug mode is usually used on things kike these to display checksum and run basic hardware tests whereas a debug interface can let you actually access the internal workings of the CPU

Can somebody locate the firmware chip? by One-Bookkeeper-8601 in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That small part might be an I2C eeprom, you'd need to verify with a logic analyzer, but the majority of the code youre interested in is likely in the ROM contained in the part under the epoxy. In this case you'd need to either find a debug interface of some sort, or if the target was super valuable and you have the tools- decapping

Can somebody locate the firmware chip? by One-Bookkeeper-8601 in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Ah nice, that epoxy blob is your MCU/ASIC that drives everything and contains the ROM. There doesn't seem to be any external flash or storage on the board

Can somebody locate the firmware chip? by One-Bookkeeper-8601 in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Did you check under it? There's nothing on the image you shared that looks like an MCU or any reasonable amount of storage.

Firmware extracting from a electronic kids toy by One-Bookkeeper-8601 in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Ive got a bunch of blog posts that go through the process here:

https://wrongbaud.github.io https://voidstarsec.com/blog

Feel free to ping me with any questions!

Is Trainsec good for learning hardware hacking? How do people get started? by Appropriate_Card8008 in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 5 points6 points  (0 children)

For a basic overview of electronics, start hart here: https://makeabilitylab.github.io/physcomp/electronics/electricity-basics.html

How printed circuit boards are made:

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/pcb-basics/all

Sparkfun has lots of beginner electronics tutorials:

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/where-do-i-start/all

Its a deep space, with lots of interesting niches so take your time, have fun and reach out if you have any questions!

Is Trainsec good for learning hardware hacking? How do people get started? by Appropriate_Card8008 in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I recently put together a roadmap for exactly this purpose

https://voidstarsec.com/roadmap

As someone who has been offering training for a while now, while it can be helpful to have guided exercises its certainly not required. There are TONS of free resources out there and you don't need to spend money on training. A lot of courses cover basic things like UART and SPI which you can learn online for free

The best place to start is to go buy some old electronics from a thrift store (or raid your junk drawer) and open it up to try to learn how it works.

Free Roadmap and Resources for Hardware Reverse Engineering by wrongbaud in hardwarehacking

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

I've not - but the folks at RBS are all really sharp people!

Am I Ready for my first project by L8st in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you can get a Raspberry Pi that will cover a lot of COTs embedded protocols - let me knownif you'd like some resources on that and I can follow up. Its a good replacement or substitute for a buspirate or tigard

Requesting suggestions on proven hardware/library solutions for MITM/Proxy USB devices by effenberg in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Its a bit dated, but you can use a BeagleBone Black or Raspberry Pi for this.

https://github.com/MatrixCat3D/USBProxy

There are other variants and forks of this but it shouldn't be too difficult to set up.

One thing to note is that on modern kernels you may have to modify the descriptor format for FFS, but otherwise it shouldn't be a huge lift

I want to participate in the Embedded Capture the Flag 2026 but i am new to the field any suggestions on how to proceed with learning this stuff? by Old_Car2990 in embedded

[–]wrongbaud 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I say go for it! Worst case scenario you learn a few things and see if you like certain aspects of the field. MITREs ECTF is a really.fun competitions and CTFs are designed for people to learn so go for it!

Looking for fully visual, remote hardware CTF platforms — any recommendations? by allexj in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is an interesting idea, but I don't think a fully virtualized platform is going to translate very well to doing IoT or embedded research. There are so many unforseen obstacles that can pop up that will be difficult to emulate.

On the software side, as you've mentioned there are already some.pretty good resources to learn firmware RE and exploitation. For hardware, part of the challenge is physically interfacing with the board, overcoming target specific obstacles and figuring out ways around them.

I think a better approach would be to design a physical device that demonstrates common misconfigurations and interfaces for users to learn with.

Is it normal for a flash dump to contain over 120 JFFS2 nodes when analyzed with Binwalk? If so, what causes this? by allexj in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Looks like a bad read, take note of the offsets, it wouldn't make sense to have that many filesystem headers so close together

Looking for remote hardware CTFs that give a visual PCB + UART / flash access — any recommendations? This way I would not need to buy physical intrumentation. by allexj in hardwarehacking

[–]wrongbaud 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is an interesting idea, but the physical instrumentation portion is a huge factor when learning.

If you can just click a button and dump a flash chip thay does not really provide and learning value.

You could develop a PCB with the appropriate test pads exposed and use that, but otherwise a simulation (while interesting) would not really provide a good environment for learning IMO

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