Reverse Engineering a Keyboard to Play Snake
spritesmods.com
spritesmods.com
I find it equally hilarious, scary and wonderful that it's now cost-effective to build a keyboard whose brain is a 72 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 127 KB of program space. Of course the manufacturer also proudly tells you this, that the keyboard is powered by an ARM. It's also fun that the firmware of the keyboard is protected (partly by the old-faithful XOR trick, even!) against IP theft.
Too bad they didn't include a hub in there, but I guess someone thinks doing so would introduce scary latency, or whatever. Gamers can be a sensitive bunch.
But with all the concern over malicious USB devices, I'll take a dumb and simple PS/2 keyboard with a mask-programmed 8048 over anything "smarter". Otherwise, his idea of requiring a special key combination to enter firmware update mode is also good - something like "unplug, then hold down X while plugging in" easily stops any malware attempting to do a silent firmware update.
If I knew what I was doing I'd try to write an OSC interface into a DAW. Things like transport control or mapping the 10 columns of keys to solo/mute/group buttons on a mixer, or trying to rig it up so that 1QAZ 2WSX 3EDC 4RFV are the 16 keys on a drum machine...
He even had time for that.
What is interesting is that "low security" of the flashing process won't hurt their sales - I would expect the opposite to happen. Free publicity exactly where your customers are. Good for you, Coolermaster!
I like skimming articles. Got to page 2 and lost interest. If it was all in one page, I may have found something of interest further down and gone back up to read the whole thing.