2024-04-22

2024-04-09

I just realized that the reason there was a seat left on my recent flight to LAX, is that it is a Boeing MAX-9, row 26.

If you have read the NTSB Preliminary Report you will recognize this as the “door plug row” that caused a lot of excitement in January.

As an automotive engineer that works on safety relevant systems every day, I have pretty high confidence that lighting won’t strike twice, but I am still keeping my seatbelt on the whole flight.

2024-04-05

2024-03-31

Starting to see flowers coming up in Portland. The daffodils are always first, but whatever this bush is comes in pretty close after

2024-03-29

Talk about unrealistic beauty standards. If this was really Oregon, it would be cloudy and everyone would be wearing sweatpants.

From Ray Atkeson’s book Oregon My Oregon.

2024-03-28

It sucks having to turn off night mode to edit photos in bed.

#night

2024-03-27

Went to the local park today.

2024-03-25

Unlocking Echo Dot Part 3: Finding the UART

2022-06-08 #echo #dot #amazon #uart

So far, we have discussed background on the Echo Dot V2, and why I am interested in reusing the hardware. We have also reused the amonet exploit to dump the eMMC of the dot.

As a next step, before we dive into the existing bootloader process, it would be useful to see a dump of the boot logs of the echo dot.

With many embedded linux systems, including android devices, a UART is included to provide lowlevel debug information about the boot process. This debug uart is only intended to be used during development, so in recent devices it can be hard to find a dedicated connector on the PCB that shows where the UART is connected. In Amazon Echo V1, there was a dedicated set of landing pads where apparently amazon development hardware can plug in, more information is available here.

Unlocking Echo Dot Part 2: Dumping the eMMC

2022-05-30 #echo #dot #amazon #brom

The first step in our process of hacking the Echo Dot is getting a dump of the EMMC, so that we can see if we can exploit the boot chain.

We have specifically chosen the Amazon Echo Dot V2 in order to aid this process. First of all, this is the last version of the Echo Dot that has a real usb port integrated in the base device. Later versions of the Echo Dot use the micro-usb port for power only, and have a proprietary footprint for the debug USB connector.