The making of the BLF UC4 charger: the start of a new venture, INTEREST LIST, UPDATE 7 (Well, ramping stopped :/ )

dmenezes · 2023-09-27T07:22:16.563Z

wolfgirl42:

The point being, I would want bluetooth on, but not “accepts connections and commands from absolutely anyone within range, no matter who” - it should only accept connections from devices the user has explicitly paired, needing physical access to pair.

Exactly. But Bluetooth access on the MC3000 (like, alas, its USB “PC Link” access) seems “bolted on”, not engineered-in as it should: it’s just sits there “open to the world”, doesn’t use any pairing or encryption.

I have the impression the BT module was just connected to one of the central MCU serial ports, and the person responsible for that integration just programmed the BT module in the simplest possible way, as a “pass-through” from the app to that serial port.

That (and more) would OFC be trivial to fix if we just had the source code for the MC3000 firmware… which unfortunately SkyRC doesn’t publish.

Among other reasons, that’s why I started an attempt to reverse engineer the MC3000 firmware… but being more of a “direct” than a “reverse” programmer myself, and after some initial success, it’s being a lot harder than I expected, and currently stumped: SkyRC MC3000: reverse-engineering the firmware update program, and extracting the firmware embedded in it

wolfgirl42:

I wouldn’t accept a keyboard or speaker that let anyone use it unauthenticated, and would return it as defective. A highly configurable battery charger can easily be used to deliberately start a fire…

Totally! I couldn’t agree with you more!

Nice. Put it on github when you’re done

Thanks! the only reason I didn’t put it up yet (nor sent a PR to its author) it’s because it’s a real mess right now – I’ve been reverse-engineering the app (more successfully than the firmware, fortunately) to try and incorporate more functionality into mc3000ble.py than simple monitoring, so the program is full of debugging code, “dead” commented-out blocks that didn’t work out (the charger refusing commands that from my reverse engineering it ought to have accepted), etc.

If you want to take a peek and promise not to curse me too much I can put the current WIP somewhere and PM you a link.

Maybe I’d get one, put it on a smart socket, then if something else grabs the bluetooth connection, I could have the monitoring program cut the power to it.

That’s a great idea! I use a couple of these guys for a lot of stuff here, with the tasmota firmware it’s just about perfect: Sonoff Pow R2 - Tasmota, the plug can be turned off with just a simple curl

And it would be trivial to incorporate a “call this external command when you loose the Bluetooth link”.

Will incorporate that idea as soon as I finish my current mod (which is to incorporate sending an entire program to each slot, and the webserver to monitor the operation without having to depend on the app).

wolfgirl42 · 2023-09-27T13:22:32.846Z

dmenezes:

If you want to take a peek and promise not to curse me too much I can put the current WIP somewhere and PM you a link.

I don’t have an MC3000 so I wouldn’t be too helpful in development, but feel free to whenever you feel the code is reasonable

dmenezes · 2023-10-03T18:44:15.479Z

a bear.:

this one’s from Bromite; GrapheneOS, Pixel 7

Just a heads-up: Bromite here started showing a warning icon which when clicked, showed a message it wasn’t being updated.

Some googling showed people talking about how its author seemed to have abandoned the project, and that its best substitute right now would be this fork: GitHub - uazo/cromite: Cromite a Bromite fork with ad blocking and privacy enhancements; take back your browser!

Hope that helps.

m03da · 2023-10-03T19:18:27.515Z

I sporadically saw the warning, thinking it’s being updated and the warning shows for a bit whenever Bromite lags behind upstream Chromium, i.e. whenever there’s a new release of Chromium that hasn’t yet been inclued in Bromite but I’ve checked now and sure enough, it’s quite a bit more than one version! Thanks for bringing this up!

mrbill · 2024-02-05T10:46:25.879Z

What’s happening with this one. Has it died, or just hybernating?

Maybe SkyRC might like to take the ideas outlined here and create something out of it?

m03da · 2024-02-05T10:48:30.989Z

I’d be up for that if the idea they decided to take was building an open source charger.

waxing_twilight · 2024-02-09T14:58:11.488Z

I’ve been wondering that as well. Hoping this project is just hibernating and will get some more attention soon.

zoulas · 2024-02-09T17:19:09.816Z

Can the person who is leading this project give a status.

papundekli · 2024-02-09T20:37:34.121Z

I think many of us are waiting.

Ocelot · 2024-02-16T21:15:33.221Z

After reading the first post, the rich feature set of this mystery charger is a dream come true, but

The only status message is “on hold” and the interest list hasnt been updated since 2020. Almost 600 signups though, should be plenty to start production.

Im game for at least 2 but im afraid this great idea has become a dream deferred.

koef3 · 2024-02-16T21:36:30.683Z

Ocelot:

Im game for at least 2 but im afraid this great idea has become a dream deferred.

Pretty sure this project is dead.
BlueSwordM was last online a year ago.

mrbill · 2024-02-17T02:40:10.919Z

Maybe someone else can take over?

m03da · 2024-02-17T09:19:29.465Z

I don’t think there’s a public repo yet, nothing the community could pick up. This happens with open source projects sometimes, be it due to creator burnout, limited time and resources or other priorities in life taking over and it’s valid, we are owed nothing by the people who decided to donate their free time and resources in this way.

That said, when the WIP stuff is made available in a repository, the community can not only continue development should the original author stop being able to continue, but also support the author a perhaps prevent them from burning out. I hope @ebastler considers this with their amazing project. It would be sad to see another one go.

mrbill · 2024-02-17T09:57:08.467Z

Perhaps one of the manufacturers could pick up the feature wish list from here and come up with a product?

m03da · 2024-02-17T10:22:18.857Z

They might but the most prominent feature will likely be lost. The MC3000 already does everything but it’s closed, as is the case with the vast majority of commercial products on the market.

ebastler · 2024-02-17T11:59:17.840Z

Mine will be 100% open sourced. I’m already keeping it in a private git repo, as soon as I reach a point where j feel comfortable releasing it I will switch it to public. Probably when I order the first prototype batch.

I’m doing too much changes on random places and haven’t fully finalized the featureset yet, so I wanna keep it private for now.

m03da · 2024-02-17T12:00:15.650Z

Way to go!

zoulas · 2024-02-17T12:02:55.658Z

Do you have an eta.

ebastler · 2024-02-17T12:34:05.795Z

Not really as I’m pretty busy with university and work stuff. The charger is mostly my “it’s evening, I don’t know what to do but still have enough energy that I don’t just wanna Netflix” project.

I’d say I’m at 80-90% of the electronics, but I’ll probably do a lot of optimizing in the end, trying to shorten power paths, space components better, allow for better heatsinking etc.

Anything between 2 weeks and 2 months until I order protos I’d guess.

zoulas · 2024-02-17T13:57:45.396Z

Cool