PIC Burnout: Dumping Protected OTP Memory In Microchip PIC MCUs

July 9, 2025 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Normally you can’t read out the One Time Programming (OTP) memory in Microchip’s PIC MCUs that have code protection enabled, but an exploit has been found that gets around the copy protection in a range of PIC12, PIC14 and PIC16 MCUs.

This exploit is called PIC Burnout, and was developed by [Prehistoricman], with the cautious note that although this process is non-invasive, it does damage the memory contents. This means that you likely will only get one shot at dumping the OTP data before the memory is ‘burned out’.

The copy protection normally returns scrambled OTP data, with an example of PIC Burnout provided for the PIC16LC63A. After entering programming mode by setting the ICSP CLK pin high, excessively high programming voltage and duration is used repeatedly while checking that an area that normally reads as zero now reads back proper data. After this the OTP should be read out repeatedly to ensure that the scrambling has been circumvented.

The trick appears to be that while there’s over-voltage and similar protections on much of the Flash, this approach can still be used to affect the entire flash bit column. Suffice it to say that this method isn’t very kind to the Flash memory cells and can take hours to get a good dump. Even after this you need to know the exact scrambling method used, which is fortunately often documented by Microchip datasheets.

Thanks to [DjBiohazard] for the tip.

Diagnosing Whisker Failure Mode In AF114 And Similar Transistors

July 6, 2025 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

The inside of this AF117 transistor can was a thriving whisker ecosystem. (Credit: Anthony Francis-Jones)

AF114 germanium transistors and related ones like the AF115 through AF117 were quite popular during the 1960s, but they quickly developed a reputation for failure. This is due to what should have made them more reliable, namely the can shielding the germanium transistor inside that is connected with a fourth ‘screen’ pin. This failure mode is demonstrated in a video by [Anthony Francis-Jones] in which he tests a number of new-old-stock AF-series transistors only for them all to test faulty and show clear whisker growth on the can’s exterior.

Naturally, the next step was to cut one of these defective transistors open to see whether the whiskers could be caught in the act. For this a pipe cutter was used on the fairly beefy can, which turned out to rather effective and gave great access to the inside of these 1960s-era components. The insides of the cans were as expected bristling with whiskers.

The AF11x family of transistors are high-frequency PNP transistors that saw frequent use in everything from consumer radios to just about anything else that did RF or audio. It’s worth noting that the material of the can is likely to be zinc and not tin, so these would be zinc whiskers. Many metals like to grow such whiskers, including lead, so the end effect is often a thin conductive strand bridging things that shouldn’t be. Apparently the can itself wasn’t the only source of these whiskers, which adds to the fun.

In the rest of the video [Anthony] shows off the fascinating construction of these germanium transistors, as well as potential repairs to remove the whisker-induced shorts through melting them. This is done by jolting them with a fairly high current from a capacitor. The good news is that this made the component tester see the AF114 as a transistor again, except as a rather confused NPN one. Clearly this isn’t an easy fix, and it would be temporary at best anyway, as the whiskers will never stop growing.

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Phone Keyboard Reverse Engineered

June 30, 2025 by Al Williams 3 Comments

Who knows what you’ll find in a second-hand shop? [Zeal] found some old keyboards made to fit early Alcatel phones from the year 2000 or so. They looked good but, of course, had no documentation. He’s made two videos about his adventure, and you can see them below.

The connector was a cellphone-style phone jack that must carry power and some sort of serial data. Inside, there wasn’t much other than a major chip and a membrane keyboard. There were a few small support chips and components, too.

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Making GameCube Keyboard Controller Work With Animal Crossing

June 26, 2025 by John Elliot V 2 Comments

[Hunter Irving] is a talented hacker with a wicked sense of humor, and he has written in to let us know about his latest project which is to make a GameCube keyboard controller work with Animal Crossing.

This project began simply enough but got very complicated in short order. Initially the goal was to get the GameCube keyboard controller integrated with the game Animal Crossing. The GameCube keyboard controller is a genuine part manufactured and sold by Nintendo but the game Animal Crossing isn’t compatible with this controller. Rather, Animal Crossing has an on-screen keyboard which players can use with a standard controller. [Hunter] found this frustrating to use so he created an adapter which would intercept the keyboard controller protocol and replace it with equivalent “keypresses” from an emulated standard controller.

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Video Game Preservation Through Decompilation

June 23, 2025 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Unlike computer games, which smoothly and continuously evolved along with the hardware that powered them, console games have up until very recently been constrained by a generational style of development. Sure there were games that appeared on multiple platforms, and eventually newer consoles would feature backwards compatibility that allowed them to play select titles from previous generations of hardware. But in many cases, some of the best games ever made were stuck on the console they were designed for.

Now, for those following along as this happened, it wasn’t such a big deal. For gamers, it was simply a given that their favorite games from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) wouldn’t play on the Nintendo 64, any more than their Genesis games could run on their Sony PlayStation. As such, it wasn’t uncommon to see several game consoles clustered under the family TV. If you wanted to go back and play those older titles, all you had to do was switch video inputs.

But gaming, and indeed the entertainment world in general, has changed vastly over the last couple of decades. Telling somebody today that the only way they can experience The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is by dragging out some yellowed thirty-odd year old console from the attic is like telling them the only way they can see a movie is by going to the theater.

These days, the expectation is that entertainment comes to you, not the other way around — and it’s an assumption that’s unlikely to change as technology marches on. Just like our TV shows and movies now appear on whatever device is convenient to us at the time, modern gamers don’t want to be limited to their consoles, they also want to play games on their phones and VR headsets.

But that leaves us with a bit of a problem. There are some games which are too significant, either technically or culturally, to just leave in the digital dust. Like any other form of art, there are pieces that deserve to be preserved for future generations to see and experience.

For the select few games that are deemed worth the effort, decompilation promises to offer a sort of digital immortality. As several recent projects have shown, breaking a game down to its original source code can allow it to adapt to new systems and technologies for as long as the community wishes to keep them updated.

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Flopped Humane “AI Pin” Gets An Experimental SDK

June 19, 2025 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

The Humane AI Pin was ambitious, expensive, and failed to captivate people between its launch and shutdown shortly after. While the units do contain some interesting elements like the embedded projector, it’s all locked down tight, and the cloud services that tie it all together no longer exist. The devices technically still work, they just can’t do much of anything.

The Humane AI Pin had some bold ideas, like an embedded projector. (Image credit: Humane)

Since then, developers like [Adam Gastineau] have been hard at work turning the device into an experimental development platform: PenumbraOS, which provides a means to allow “untrusted” applications to perform privileged operations.

As announced earlier this month on social media, the experimental SDK lets developers treat the pin as a mostly normal Android device, with the addition of a modular, user-facing assistant app called MABL. [Adam] stresses that this is all highly experimental and has a way to go before it is useful in a user-facing sort of way, but there is absolutely a workable architecture.

When the Humane AI Pin launched, it aimed to compete with smartphones but failed to impress much of anyone. As a result, things folded in record time. Humane’s founders took jobs at HP and buyers were left with expensive paperweights due to the highly restrictive design.

Thankfully, a load of reverse engineering has laid the path to getting some new life out of these ambitious devices. The project could sure use help from anyone willing to pitch in, so if that’s up your alley be sure to join the project; you’ll be in good company.

The Cost Of A Cheap UPS Is 10 Hours And A Replacement PCB

May 29, 2025 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

Recently [Florin] was in the market for a basic uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to provide some peace of mind for the smart home equipment he had stashed around. Unfortunately, the cheap Serioux LD600LI unit he picked up left a bit to be desired, and required a bit of retrofitting.

To be fair, the issues that [Florin] ended up dealing with were less about the UPS’ capability to deal with these power issues, and more with the USB interface on the UPS. Initially the UPS seemed to communicate happily with HomeAssistant (HA) via Network UPS Tools over a generic USB protocol, after figuring out what device profile matched this re-branded generic UPS. That’s when HA began to constantly lose the connection with the UPS, risking its integration in the smart home setup.

The old and new USB-serial boards side by side. (Credit: VoltLog, YouTube)

After tearing down the UPS to see what was going on, [Florin] found that it used a fairly generic USB-serial adapter featuring the common Cypress CY7C63310 family of low-speed USB controller. Apparently the firmware on this controller was simply not up to the task or poorly implemented, so a replacement was needed.

The process and implementation is covered in detail in the video. It’s quite straightforward, taking the 9600 baud serial link from the UPS’ main board and using a Silabs CP2102N USB-to-UART controller to create a virtual serial port on the USB side. These conversion boards have to be fully isolated, of course, which is where the HopeRF CMT8120 dual-channel digital isolator comes into play.

After assembly it almost fully worked, except that a Sonoff Zigbee controller in the smart home setup used the same Silabs controller, with thus the same USB PID/VID combo. Fortunately in Silabs AN721 it’s described how you can use an alternate PID (0xEA63) which fixed this issue until the next device with a CP2102N is installed

As it turns out, the cost of a $40 UPS is actually 10 hours of work and $61 in parts, although one cannot put a value on all the lessons learned here.

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