[LAD] Looking for interested developer - TonePrint editor & TC Electronic Plethora X5

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 8:12 AM Sam Kuper <sampablokuper at posteo.net> wrote:
<SNIP>
>
> Since the X5 presents a USB mass storage device to the OS and uses
> that to upgrade the firmware, at least you should be able to upgrade the
> X5's firmware from your GNU/Linux box.
>

Sure, but that's probably not going to happen very often, at least in terms
of new firmware coming from TC. WRT to hacking the whole platform to reuse
the hardware under Linux it's a possibility but at $500 sort of expensive
if it goes haywire.

> That firmware upgrade path might provide opportunities for future
> reverse engineering attempts.   (In addition to searching the PCB for
> JTAG headers, etc.)
>

Agreed/ Completely possible. I suppose there's some opportunity to reverse
engineer the firmware starting with instruction sets and what not but it's
of no immediate interest to me. Being a hardware guy myself I'd be more
interested in starting from scratch but your link to ModDevices suggests an
easier starting place than designing my own hardware.

> I wonder how the Windows software communicates with the X5, though.
> That's not obvious from the lsusb output.  A reverse engineer might need
> to intercept/sniff the USB traffic between the X5 and a Windows host to
> figure that out.
>

I set up WireShark as it's reported to sniff USB. Under Linux I got some
packets. Under Windows I haven't made much progress yet but it's early days.

Cheers,
Mark
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