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