I think the most computer 'hacker' thing I did was reverse engineering a communication protocol for an industrial motion controller to unlock hidden commands used exclusively by their app

I think the most computer 'hacker' thing I did was reverse engineering a communication protocol for an industrial motion controller to unlock hidden commands used exclusively by their app

Turned out they just created a private channel by adding a fixed 127 byte offset to the ASCII values on the controller which just needed to be subtracted to be read on the PC side. User commands are in the usual 128 byte ASCII range and a private upper one between 128-256, providing two channels while keeping things in the ubyte format. It's quite clever, since you can simply check if a byte is >127 to determine which channel the data belongs to and putting it into the correct buffer without requiring another port. This strat might not work well for pure binary data, but it works for ASCII text

#electronics