Ask HN: Seeeking help to reverse engineer a PCB

8•Dlg001•16h ago

We are a small manufacturing company currently developing our own self balancing wheelchair. We have been purchasing PCB gyro board for Chinese company to test the wheelchair. I requested they changed a number of parameters on the firmware to add additional safety measures to the project. They appear to be reluctant to do this work ... with no logical reason why, I presume they themselves do have access to its development.

I am looking for a company capable of reverse engineer the PCB we have been testing and gain access to the firmware and making some software revisions. Is this possible, are you interested in taking on this work. I welcome you thoughts.

Comments

aappleby•1h ago

They can't do the work because they copied the firmware from some other company's product and don't actually know how it works.

That other company probably also copied it from somewhere else, etc.

leetbulb•20m ago

Yeah. They, too, likely hired someone to reverse engineer it to make their own modifications. Let's add another to the chain. Surely the firmware could only become more "safe" with Lego block hacks. That's the point, right, OP?

All things considered, it sounds like the "gyro board" module is probably something that is OTS and already certified for use in a healthcare product. Wonder what the legality is of modifying such a thing in such a way?

As others have suggested, make your own or use a more ubiquitous module from the open source community. Integration wise, Claude can probably get you 80% of the way there.

15155•1h ago

> I presume they themselves do have access to its development.

Bad presumption.

Just develop a new board with your own bespoke design and firmware, possibly inspired by theirs. If you can't do this, you shouldn't be in this business.

iancmceachern•47m ago

We do this all day, would be very happy to help.

www.iancollmceachern.com

dghlsakjg•47m ago

Which PCB gyro board?

When I think of "PCB gyro boards" it is typically a commodity chip like the MPU-9250 packaged on a board with the necessary filtering caps, etc, There is not any firmware to modify really, all of the processing is done by a separate MCU that handles the filtering and processing.