If I were an alien and saw this, I would run. Terrifying.

My brain hurts any time I hear about a completed hardware hack, but this write-up just takes the cake. My experience with hardware RE is limited to a class project hacking a cheap router, and there even after 3 weeks I couldn't make sense of the can of worms that is interfacing with JTAG using OpenOCD. It's like looking at bats and then shouting into the dark and somehow you get the right words for echolocation. Then you do it for 10 animals in a row. I will check out Wrongbaud's guide.

So my question is: how do you learn to speak the dozens of languages for hardware? Every step in this project, from soldering custom modules to figuring out correct JTAG settings to inferring flash layout to reversing checksums, seems like it would take me a lifetime. What was the path to be able to do this in one lifetime?

Posts like this are the reason why the internet and software development felt magic to me as teenager.

This stuff still is magic to me. Wonderful work!

Wow, that is a deep level of commitment and learning/exploring; I love it. While I'm sure this is informed by deep preexisting knowledge (to a point -- it's still badass in its own right), I can't help but admire these skills and feel a little inferior about my own.

What a badass level of deep dive.

It is so easy to use signature verification and even encrypted XIP with Mcuboot it just blows my mind that companies don’t.

Also the level of reverse engineering here is kinda bananas. I almost don’t believe he was able to find the transfer functions for the dsp bias equations w/o some source guidance. I mean that’s just bad ass if he did it without help.

I’m always very impressed by this type of hardware/firmware reverse engineering. So many places to get completely stuck and fizzle out.

I assume that happens a lot, but few people would write a blog about their inability to break a protocol or decipher a memory layout.

Nice :) I did this for my Axe-Fx II and III a long time ago, but I never published any of it for fear of being sued. Really, I just wanted to learn about DSP techniques and that was enough for me.

Love it! I have the THR10 non-"C" version of this amp and often wondered if it's hackable.

This is awesome, couldn't the firmware just be extracted from the updater though?

at this point you can submit a job application for them :)

Man I love this stuff. I'm not big on digital guitar amps, but digital synths are another story.

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