Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available

Re:Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available by Dav3xor on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @04:16PM (#1891815)

I've reverse engineered some protocols -- haven't done a USB one yet, but I'm sure the principals are similar. Grab some data, look at it (usually with a good hex editor -- last time I used ghex2), look for patterns. Usually there's some sort of packet structure, or maybe some data that looks like something in ascii -- ghex2 shows you what every 2 bytes or 4 bytes are if they were signed/unsigned ints, floats etc. Usually something will jump out at you.

It's a fun game usually.

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Re:Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available by temugen on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @09:08PM (#1892580)

And if you can actually input data using the protocol, you can take some standard packets and tweak a byte/short/long at a time and see what changes.

Reversing USB is the same as any protocol on top of TCP is the same as any other protocol, just with different tools.

I wish there were an open source hex editor like Hex Workshop for Windows - one of the features I loved was tagging a section of bytes with comments, and being able to use those same tags across multiple data dumps.

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Re:Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available by opello on Thursday November 11, 2010 @01:47AM (#1893118)

Particularly handy for USB on Linux is the 'usbmon' module. Which when used with a kernel that has debugfs support, you can mount debugfs and use a new enough Wireshark to monitor the USB traffic.

http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/USB

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Re:Kinect reverse-engineered; open driver available by hoggle on Thursday November 11, 2010 @12:51AM (#1893025)

You could write your own by extending OSS like hexdump or hexcurse or any other hex editor. It shouldn't be to big a deal to add that functionality. It's just beautiful what you can do with open source code! Don't forget to share.

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