Using AI to reverse engineer hardware

XorNot

How timely, I just now pointed Claude at my work laptops MIPI driver and told it to figure it out.

tinchos

Oh man, I did fall into that rabbit hole. I took my old mp3 player Onn-x5 and just finished a custom firmware for it. Explore and reverse engineer it just from connecting it to my computer.

rvz

Instead of targeting extremely ancient hardware that almost no-one uses, what if you got Claude to reverse engineer useful closed source hardware and software? Both Apple and Nvidia are the most hostile and have the most locked-down heavy hardware and software and now Claude can reverse engineer and build a driver to get Nvidia GPUs working on Intel Macs [0] and it can unlock the ability to pair an Apple watch with Android phones. [1] Now it makes even more sense to target reverse engineering CUDA, Nvidia firmware blobs and Apple software to finally make them run better on Linux without waiting for those vendors to fix their bugs or deliberately slowing their own hardware down. No more excuses. [0] https://github.com/nullmoth/nvidia-macos-driver [1] https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-watch-companion-pair-...

xnx

Someone please do "smart" TVs. You have the chance to remove ads and botnets ("residential proxies") from millions of devices.

valdiorn

I've been having a silent panic attack for the last 3 days, and I don't really have anyone to talk to that would understand my concern. I run a small pro audio company, we make guitar pedals and audio effects mostly. My current key objective is building up a processor similar to the Eventide H90, that would compete on having top-notch algorithms for reverb, delay, chorus etc. we already have single-effect pedals on the market that are very successful. In the past 72 hours I have ONE-SHOT decompiled 3 of my main competitors products, including the Strymon Big Sky. I just... have their award winning algorithms now. Like, I could in theory just stick them in a box and resell them. It took one prompt and 3 hours for opus 5.5 to work that out. The lexicon 224 then got added. While Claude was prepping It found someone else had already done the same thing 1 weeks earlier and dumped the result on GitHub, so it just stole that code and saved some time. It took all of 20 minutes to do the entire Ursa Major product range. And yes, I've tested them all - and they all sound phenomenal. I specifically asked Claude to first build an emulator and execute the original firmware/ROM so I could be certain it wasn't just making "something similar" but actually executing the same code. Then I asked it to convert it into a self contained c++ library and compare the result to the emulator. The problem is, everyone can now do this to my products as well. Basically, anyone with a Claude subscription can now rip of any best-in-class algorithm from any competitor. While I'm not going to do that, I know there are 30 Chinese companies that happily would. The moat of hardware effects processors has just vanished.

javier2

As an aside: I tried using claude to write GTK4 applications in december 2025/january 2026 and it was awful at it, barely even helpful. Then in September it's writing great gtk4 apps with barely any prompting.

amelius

Soon: "Hi Claude, can you translate iOS so it runs in a sandbox on Linux?" Or: "Can you turn this tablet I got from AliExpress into an iPad?" It's going to be interesting to watch the big companies struggle with this.

revolvingthrow

I reverse engineered almost all electronics I own. Does it have USB that does more than just charging? Connect it to a computer and let AI play with it. Unless it's heavily secured like a phone that's pretty much all you need to do. Making some old remote work with various devices? Simple. Dumping the entire state of Rodecaster and controlling it in any you want with software, or maybe a remote? Why not. Old printer no longer works with MacOS 27? Ask for new drivers and now it does. The printer 'debugging' was one of the funniest and most WTF situations I've been in lately. I used Claude for the drivers and was essentially used by it as a meat sock to diagnose what's happening. Was the text on each line progressively less visible, ie did grayscale work? How about quality between page 1 and 2, the first one should be lower DPI. Ok now unload the paper so I can see the error and add some handling for it. Good, now load paper again we'll check the duplex. If you are reasonably familiar with computers, it really is as simple as pointing a strong model at a device and burning some tokens. Feels like a fever dream, especially since I had very little idea about anything that has to do with hardware.

jack_sunsetless

Software is in the same boat. Licenses and obfuscation never really protected anything - it was just too much work/effort to copy. Now it's one prompt..

LoganDark

> only to discover that in the time between me giving up and then trying again someone had committed code to SANE to support the scanner already…..it happens sometimes. One of the best things you can do in these situations is to actually audit the code that was contributed against the code you have. If you have more than was contributed, you could potentially still make a contribution of what's missing, against the structure of the existing contribution.

rmnclmnt

A few weeks ago, I had Claude develop a CUPS driver running over a Bluetooth connection for the mini photo printer Canon Zoemini 2: works great on Linux (NixOS), even though Canon only bothered to only support smartphones, never desktops!

robgibbons

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this what patents are for?

mrheosuper

Currently i'm using Opus to decompile bin blob and write a complete Bluetooth controller firmware for a chinese MCU. They are really good at it.

cookiengineer

I had an obscure Alcatel modem/router laying around with undocumented hardware, where even the mainboard's CPU/SoC serial etc didn't return any results from any search engines. Soldered UART pins on it, plugged my USB adapter into my computer, then asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware blob. Took DeepSeek v4.1 flash around an hour to get a full OpenWRT build-and-flash pipeline up and running, using an isolated podman build container and everything. The outdated OEM Kernel made it easy to identify the SoC hardware. drivers and proprietary Wi-Fi and Bluetooth driver mods (not really legal btw, because they "conveniently forgot" to publish GPL'd source code). Driver mods were successfully reversed through analyzing the .so and .ko files with frida in another podman container. Overall took me less than half a day to do all this, and now I have OpenWRT running on that device, compiled from source with the upstream modern kernel. To me, observing all that, and how quickly it found encryption keys, signing mechanisms, encodings, binary formats, instruction sets, disassembling it etc by just looking at the hexdumps ... this would have taken me weeks if not months. And now comes the kicker, all that cost me 0.86$ AI and reverse engineering is like tap water now. There's no reason to not consider using it, because it's so accessible. There's just absolutely no point in proprietary hardware and software anymore. My current project after this: I've soldered the UART pins to a proprietary Xiaomi smartphone I had laying around, and I'm currently letting it reverse engineer the baseband firmware. Let's see where this ends up ...

TiredOfLife

Isn't Gnome really Anti-AI?

yeutterg

I have KEF LSX II LT speakers on my desk. They sound wonderful, but they have this annoying issue in which waking them from standby plays REALLY LOUD music for a second or two before settling on the correct volume. It's jarring, and it's a widespread issue. In a few hours yesterday, I built a macOS menu bar app [0] that ramps up the volume when the USB output is triggered. This is not reverse engineering but an effective workaround. I am tempted to try to reverse engineer the speakers and see if I could fix them myself. But 1) I have a feeling they have security features enabled and 2) I would rather not brick this rather expensive pair of speakers. [0] https://github.com/yeutterg/bookshelf-bar

OleksiiA

Maybe someday someone will use this to make infotainment in cars like Polestar and Lucid actually stable and usable?