Reverse Engineering The Playstation Move

playstation_move

[Kenn] is working on building a quadrocopter from the ground up for a university project. Currently, his main focus is building an Inertial Measurement Unit, or rather re-purposing a PS3 Move controller as the IMU for his copter. He previously considered using a Wiimote Motion Plus, but the Move has a three-axis magnetometer, which the Wii controller does not.

The ultimate goal for this portion of his project is building custom firmware to run on the Move’s STM32-Cortex microcontroller, allowing him to obtain data from each of the controller’s sensors. Through the course of his research, he has thoroughly documented each sensor on his site, and dumped a full working firmware image from the Cortex chip as well. Recently, he was even able to run arbitrary code on the controller itself, which is a huge step forward.

[Kenn’s] project is coming along very nicely, and will undoubtedly be a great resource to others as he continues to dig through the inner workings of the Move. Be sure to swing by his site if you are looking for information, or if you have something to contribute.

12 thoughts on “Reverse Engineering The Playstation Move

  1. insert comment about sony coming after you if you do this now. Sounds silly but i wonder how many will scrap the idea of working on sony content considering their current actions.

    All that said hopefully he will be able to get his project done.

  2. Really good work by the guy :)

    I can see about zero people changing their attitude towards hacking sony kit given that sony will try and hit them up with a law suit. What I can see is people not necessarily publishing the inner workings of how others may achieve what they’ve done but don’t bank on that either.

    I can see hackers and hacker groups doing what they always do, getting organised, becoming anonymous (again) and carrying on as usual.

  3. Can we hack a decent windows driver together for the stupid PS3 controllers while we’re at it?

    -please?

    Too many hoops to jump through for Windows users to make it work with a standard Bluetooth connection at the moment.
    It’s regoramdiculous when you think of how many they’d sell with a simple driver release.

  4. I’m actually planning the internal installation of yet another Xbox 360 wireless receiver into a netbook because the hardware mod/driver install is ultimately less hassle than that BT mess over the long haul.

    It shows where my skillset resides, but still…

  5. It’s interesting that so many comments seem to focus on me getting sued. I can’t really say I understand the attitude that completely reprogramming something bought at a profit, without EULA, without any contract etc.. should attract a lawsuit.

    I would see this the exact same as the people on motioninjoy.com reading the Move reports and doing arbitrary things. Or even just using the WiiMote for other fun and cool projects. I’m just taking it a step further (back) from the PS3 and reprogramming the firmware.

    I suppose Sony’s war on hackers really _has_ scared a lot of people. Stand tall, guys, this is our future at stake!

  6. He should beware of posting something like a firmware dump, especially if he doesn’t know whether or not sony owns that firmware. Its like posting a console’s bios file or rom on the internet. Might be able to get away with it if it was developed using open-source software though.

    Who knows. Sounds cool though.

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