Originally Posted by
Bohemian1
I don't have a 'scope anymore either. Once I figure out ground and power, I'll just sniff the interface using an ESP-32 (possibly with level shifters) as a probe.
Tedious reverse engineering, but I've done it before with even weirder RF stuff.
If this thing is indeed as old on the inside as it looks on the outside, such as mostly using through hole components where you can easily read the labels, only have 2 layers of traces, etc, then it would be relatively easy to reverse engineer. What I find the most challenging is when I have to probe a pin of a tiny SMD chip and I can't find any good place to probe it other than soldering a tiny wire on the pin itself. One time I had to do it on an 8-bit bus... 🥴
Originally Posted by
RangerNS
Electronics are not my jam to a level beyond pure hackery, but I've seen enough youtubers with RIGOL scopes with no more hacking than soldering a single shunt to know that you can get very powerful capabilities - including protocol debugging - for less than... well, considerably less than price of a flight to YYC for the weekend.
And with some knowledge of micro controllers and FPGA, or the powerful FPGA SoC boards that can be purchased for around $200, lots of protocol debugging work can be automated. I was lucky enough to work with some great engineers and they showed me lots of things I couldn't learn in school or on Youtube.
Hope this isn't as painful as Leetcode, though it definitely feels like an achievement to spend half a day working on a Leetcode hard problem, first meeting the functional requirements, then optimizing, sometime rewriting the whole solution, to reduce the time and memory requirements.