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Comment by rfgplk

13 hours ago

Pretty much anything hardware based is like this. Everything is 100% closed source and bolted down such that inspecting it is outright impossible without extensive reverse engineering.

9 comments

rfgplk

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hn_submit  13 hours ago

I believe one of the feasibilities we have with electric locomotion is the standardization of components: electric motors, motor controllers, batteries and battery chargers. These being interchangeable will lead to lower costs through competition and more innovation.

It's disappointing that manufacturers are moving the other way to enable vendor lock-in. But only one manufacturer has to jump the fence and the others will be left behind.

  • awakeasleep  9 hours ago

    I’m suspicious of this vision because for example, with battery packs, cells with compatible voltage and size have vastly different characteristics.

    Those characteristics, like safe discharge rate, capacity, projected cycle count, are all things that manufactures exaggerate or get wrong.

    I don’t think there’s any way that consumers can ever be informed enough to have an efficient market in products such as those

IshKebab  7 hours ago

I definitely think AI is going to change this. Astra is shockingly good at reverse engineering. I was working with a proprietary software library and I just asked it how some (poorly documented) function worked and it just went off and disassembled it without me even prompting. I asked it if there was a way of disabling some error checks and it went and found some undocumented functions (not in the header), disassembled them and figured out how to use them for me.

I didn't actually even give it the ability to run this code and it could still reverse engineer everything.

  • plausibility  41 minutes ago

    I've been surprised how much Astra prefers to go off script to "find the answer" than Sol was unprompted.

    I've been doing some PCB design lately, and I was working up the firmware with Codex and asked about how to handle a specific part of my SPI setup. The firmware and KiCad hardware are in different folders/repos so none of it was in-context, but Astra just decided to `find` the folder nearby, then read the KiCad net lists by directly invoking the KiCad CLI on the .kicad_sch/.kicad_pcb files it found. Topped it off by reading the Espressif code vendored in my PlatformIO install to make sure everything would work.

  • Gigachad  6 hours ago

    For now, but I think eventually the hardware companies will catch on and build everything much more locked down with signed firmwares, keys burned in to the chip, encrypted communications with accessories, etc.