I bricked my Christmas lights • Hacker News Board

Re: I bricked my Christmas lights

#81

Post by exikyut » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 5:57 AM UTC

treyd wrote: post #74

londons_explore wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very clever. IoT pairing is a tricky problem because phone/laptop devices give a very limited API for communicating with a new WiFi device that isn't yet on your WiFi network.

Isn't this was bluetooth was supposed to be able to help with?

I suspect Tuya wants a solution that lets them implement a solution stack for Wi-Fi+BT and Wi-Fi-only MCUs alike.

:/

Re: I bricked my Christmas lights

#82

Post by bloggie » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 11:56 AM UTC

willcooke wrote: post #57

MegaDeKay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These don't appear to be WS2812. Look at the Ali link he posted. There is a pic of the wires that show four conductors on the strip: 12V, red, green, and blue. I think this is an analog RGB strip where are the lights in the strip are the same color vs. individually addressible. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005485885067.html Anybody wanting to do anything with LED lighting owes it to themselves to look at WLED.…

The actual string I have is three wires. Data and + - it’s likely they have been swapped out for cheaper lesds now, or the picture is wrong.

There are individually addressable leds that have their ‘address’ burned into them and use a ws2812-style protocol, it could be that. There will only be one continuous data wire, which is cheaper to assemble and resistant to single LED failures.

Re: I bricked my Christmas lights

#83

Post by davidacoder » Mon, Dec 18, 2023, 10:16 PM UTC

dceddia wrote: post #42

Nice writeup! It reminded me of trying to reverse engineer some lights I have, only to discover they’re encrypted. One is an amaran 60d and then the rest are a handful of SmallRig RM75 battery LED lights, and I wanted to make a script to turn them all on/off instead of fiddling with 2 separate apps. I spent a bunch of time trying to reverse engineer the apps and the protocol, and it turns out both of these lights see…

Oh, I would so love to see you succeed with the Amaran lights, which presumably would lead to all of the Aputure stuff being reverse engineered? I think if there was an open-source integration for them with say the Elgato Stream Deck or Home Assistant, it would be a major, major success story. For all those YouTube folks that do talking head at their desk this would be sooo much better than controlling them via an app on the phone.

Re: I bricked my Christmas lights

#84

Post by Woshiwuja » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 10:52 AM UTC

m4dc4pXXX wrote: post #50

Why are these messages encrypted? Is that just a standard thing?

I don't think that's standard, probably just manufacturer crap but i never tried to hack christmas lights

Re: I bricked my Christmas lights

#85

Post by blincoln » Tue, Dec 19, 2023, 4:10 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #55

exikyut wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tuya is so hilarious in this regard. The protocol is just TLS over TCP, but the app happily sprays your Wi-Fi password to every STA in the area every time you add a new device. (It's how pairing is done - the app blindly broadcasts packets to 255.255.255.255 and the target device (lightbulb, power outlet, et al) just sits in promiscuous mode. The packet contents are protected by WPA2 et al, but the packet lengths are…

Very clever. IoT pairing is a tricky problem because phone/laptop devices give a very limited API for communicating with a new WiFi device that isn't yet on your WiFi network.

All of the decent WiFi-only IoT devices I've seen bootstrap the process by acting as an access point of their own until they're configured. There are some opportunities for securing that initial connection better, like ensuring that the WPA2 key for the temporary AP mode is complex and unique to each device, but I haven't come across a fundamental flaw in the approach. Are you aware of any?

I'd prefer an out-of-band option, like "physically connect the new device to the IoT hub's 'new device' port to configure it automatically before moving it to its permanent location", or "scan the QR code on the new device, which contains a public key that the IoT hub will use to broadcast the WiFi credentials over RF", but I understand that at least for mass-market residential products, that's unlikely because it generally involves more components on each device.