Reverse Engineering a Dash Robot with Ghidra

One of the joys of browsing secondhand shops is the possibility of finding old, perhaps restorable or hackable, electronics at low prices. Admittedly, they usually seem to be old flat-screen TVs, cheap speakers, and Blu-ray players, but sometimes you find something like the Dash, an educational toy robot. When [Jonathan] came across one of these, he decided to use it as a turtle robot. However, he found the available Python libraries insufficient, and improving on them required some reverse-engineering.

While [Jonathan] was rather impressed with the robot as it was – it had a good set of features, and thought had clearly been put into the design – he wanted a more open way to control it. There was already a quite useful, official Python program to control the robot over a BLE connection, but it only worked with Python 2 on OS X ([Jonathan] theorizes that it might have been written as a development tool, open-sourced, and not diligently supported afterwards). There were also a few third-party libraries ported to Python 3, but they all seemed to be missing some important features.

All the newer libraries were limited because the official library passed commands to an OS X binary, which handled the actual communication, so anyone wanting to do everything in Python would have to reverse-engineer the communications protocol. [Jonathan] therefore used Ghidra to decompile the binary. He first found the JSON structure used for message data, followed by a function that reads command information and sets up packets, and a mapping between Python command names and command IDs. Once he found the section that creates packets from data, he was able to port the program to Python 3. Interestingly, examining the binary revealed some previously unknown commands that appear to be capable of defining autonomous behavior.

We’ve previously seen Ghidra used on devices ranging from a camera to a router; if you’d like to learn more, there’s a HackadayU course on it.

hackaday.com/2026/02/14/revers…

Vintage Canadian Video Hardware Becomes Homebrew Computer

Are you in the mood for a retrocomputing deep dive into the Scriptovision Super Micro Script? It was a Canadian-made vintage video titler from the 80s, and [Cameron Kaiser] has written up a journey of repair and reverse-engineering for it. But his work is far more than just a refurbish job; [Cameron] transforms the device into something not unlike 8-bit homebrew computers of the era, able to upload and run custom programs with a limited blister keypad for input, and displaying output on a composite video monitor.

Hardware-wise, the Super Micro Script is almost a home computer, so [Cameron] got it accepting and running custom code.A video titler like the Super Micro Script gave people the ability to display bitmapped images (like text or simple graphics) onto a video stream electronically. A standalone device, under the hood, it uses a 6502 as CPU and a Motorola 6847 VDG video chip. [Cameron] observes that architecture-wise, it actually had a lot in common with early 8-bit home computers. Sure, it performed only one “job” but that really had more to do with its restrictive firmware than anything else.

[Cameron] obtained a used unit and repaired it, reverse-engineered the scrambled address and data lines (an anti-cloning and anti-tampering measure), and converted it into something for which he could write his own software and run his own programs. As for uploading those programs? A bit-banged serial port on I/O borrowed from the blister keypad, running at a frankly quite respectable 19.2 kbps.

We hope you’re intrigued, because [Cameron] has one more surprise: he created a MAME emulator for the Super Micro Script called SMSBUG. Originally created to make software development easier, its existence also means anyone can join in on the vintage computing fun. The emulator, along with other handy utilities and info, is available on GitHub.

hackaday.com/2026/02/14/vintag…

RE: mastodon.uno/@informapirata/11…

Toeleveringsketen: De nieuwe F-35's arriveren zonder radars, en vertragingen bij de upgrade van de AN/APG-85 maken het gebruik van ballast noodzakelijk.

De nieuwe F-35 gevechtsvliegtuigen van de vijfde generatie worden zonder radars in gebruik genomen door de Amerikaanse luchtmacht en worden zelfs in deze configuratie ingezet. De reden hiervoor is wederom een ​​projectvertraging en problemen met de levering van onderdelen.

en.defence-ua.com/news/us_deli…

@news

informapirata ⁂

2026-02-11 17:49:23

Supplì chain: i nuovi F-35 arrivano senza radar e i ritardi nell'aggiornamento dell'AN/APG-85 rendono necessario utilizzare la zavorra🤡

I nuovi caccia F-35 di quinta generazione stanno entrando in servizio presso l'Aeronautica Militare statunitense senza radar e vengono addirittura impiegati in questa configurazione. Il motivo è l'ennesimo ritardo del progetto e problemi di fornitura di componenti.

en.defence-ua.com/news/us_deli…

@news

U.S. Delivers New F-35 Fighters Without Radars Due to Upgrade Delays, Mounting Issues | Defense Express

New F-35s arrive without radars as AN/APG-85 upgrade delays force U.S. Air Force to use ballast as temporary fix

^{en.defence-ua.com}

Windows 98 on a 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 Laptop

The lovely thing about the x86 architecture is its decades of backwards compatibility, which makes it possible to run 1990s operating systems on modern-day hardware, with relatively few obstacles in the way. Recently [Yeo Kheng Meng] did just that with Windows 98 SE on a 2020 ThinkPad P12s Gen 1, booting it alongside Windows 11 and Linux from the same NVMe drive.

Naturally, after previously getting MS-DOS 6.22 from 1994 running on a 2020 ThinkPad X13, the step to doing the same with Windows 98 SE wasn’t that large. The main obstacles that you face come in the form of UEFI and hardware driver support.

Both ThinkPad laptops have in common that they support UEFI-CSM mode, also known as ‘classical BIOS’, as UEFI boot wasn’t even a glimmer yet in some drunk engineer’s eye when Win98 was released. After this everything is about getting as many hardware drivers scrounged together as possible.

[Yeo] ended up having to bodge on a USB 2.0 expansion card via a Thunderbolt dock as Win98 doesn’t have xHCI (USB 3.0) support. With that issue successfully bodged around using a veritable tower of adapters, installing Windows 98 was as easy as nuking Secure Boot in the BIOS, enabling UEFI-CSM along with Thunderbolt BIOS assist mode and disable Kernel DMA protection.

Because UEFI-CSM implementations tend to be buggy, the CREGFIX DOS driver was used to smooth things over. Another issue is the same that we chuckled about back in the day, as Windows 98 cannot address more than 512 MB of RAM by default. Fortunately patches by [Rudolph Loew] helped to fix this and some other smaller issues.

Unfortunately neither Intel nor NVIDIA have released Win98 drivers for quite some time, so there’s no graphics acceleration beyond basic VESA support and the SoftGPU driver. Disk access goes via the BIOS too rather than using an NVMe driver, so it’s not as zippy as it could be, but for Win9x it’s quite usable.

Finally ACPI wasn’t recognized by Win98, but it’s only fair to blame that on the complete flaming train wreck that is ACPI rather than anything to do with Windows. This particular issue was worked around by configuring the BIOS to support S3 power state and with that making Win98 happy again.

It’s honestly quite a shame that UEFI-CSM is largely ignored by new systems, as it makes installing even Windows 7 basically impossible, and thus creating probably the largest split within the x86 ecosystem since the arrival of AMD64/x86_64.

hackaday.com/2026/02/14/window…