Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
spritesmods.com
Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#2This was very educational.
I find it equally hilarious, scary and wonderful that it's now cost-effective to build a keyboard whose brain is a 72 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 127 KB of program space. Of course the manufacturer also proudly tells you this, that the keyboard is powered by an ARM. It's also fun that the firmware of the keyboard is protected (partly by the old-faithful XOR trick, even!) against IP theft.
Too bad they didn't include a hub in there, but I guess someone thinks doing so would introduce scary latency, or whatever. Gamers can be a sensitive bunch.
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#3yeah nice read dude.
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#4It's awesome to see the writeup on this. Ran into the video a few days ago on /r/mechanicalkeyboards and was surprised that it didn't got more attention than it did! I think I might end up buying one of these CMs now...
If I knew what I was doing I'd try to write an OSC interface into a DAW. Things like transport control or mapping the 10 columns of keys to solo/mute/group buttons on a mixer, or trying to rig it up so that 1QAZ 2WSX 3EDC 4RFV are the 16 keys on a drum machine...
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#5Nice Hack!
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#6That is downright hilarious!
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#7This was very educational. I find it equally hilarious, scary and wonderful that it's now cost-effective to build a keyboard whose brain is a 72 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 127 KB of program space. Of course the manufacturer also proudly tells you this, that the keyboard is powered by an ARM. It's also fun that the firmware of the keyboard is protected (partly by the old-faithful XOR trick, even!) against IP theft. Too ba…
For his next trick, create a worm that can use these keyboards to hide a rootkit?
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#8This was very educational. I find it equally hilarious, scary and wonderful that it's now cost-effective to build a keyboard whose brain is a 72 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 127 KB of program space. Of course the manufacturer also proudly tells you this, that the keyboard is powered by an ARM. It's also fun that the firmware of the keyboard is protected (partly by the old-faithful XOR trick, even!) against IP theft. Too ba…
It's probably more than powerful enough to emulate a C64... where the computer is literally inside the keyboard.
But with all the concern over malicious USB devices, I'll take a dumb and simple PS/2 keyboard with a mask-programmed 8048 over anything "smarter". Otherwise, his idea of requiring a special key combination to enter firmware update mode is also good - something like "unplug, then hold down X while plugging in" easily stops any malware attempting to do a silent firmware update.
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#9This is actually pretty nice, the guy is a Tweaker... Which means he is a member of the Dutch newssite : Tweakers.nl which is a very popular site for Dutch speaking persons (The Netherlands and Belgians). There is a video about it on (same as on the conclusion page of the site though) : http://tweakers.net/video/9730/tweaker-hackt-keyboard-om-sna...
Re: Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
#10This was very educational. I find it equally hilarious, scary and wonderful that it's now cost-effective to build a keyboard whose brain is a 72 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 127 KB of program space. Of course the manufacturer also proudly tells you this, that the keyboard is powered by an ARM. It's also fun that the firmware of the keyboard is protected (partly by the old-faithful XOR trick, even!) against IP theft. Too ba…
It's probably more than powerful enough to emulate a C64... where the computer is literally inside the keyboard. But with all the concern over malicious USB devices, I'll take a dumb and simple PS/2 keyboard with a mask-programmed 8048 over anything "smarter". Otherwise, his idea of requiring a special key combination to enter firmware update mode is also good - something like "unplug, then hold down X while plugging…
Personally, I think we need more open source day-to-day peripherals like this: keyboards, USB hubs, card readers, everything. It all needs to be replaced with open, inspectable, blob-less, user-upgradable alternatives.