M+ computer internals + info

The updates are definitely encrypted, so it would be very helpful to have a dumped version of the eMMC, unless of course it's encrypted at rest lol I don't think that's likely though for a number of reasons. I think you're correct though that if one were to dump the eMMC that you would most likely be able to decrypt any future updates, at least until they changed keys, but then you just repeat the process.

The major issue I had with taking the CPU module from the M+ and plugging it into the carrier-dev-kit was the display. As everyone is certainly aware, the M+ has a non-standard display format. The CPU vendor actual makes a program that's used specifically to create custom screen layouts and then save them in the BIOS. So the M+ module would boot, but I had no real way to interact with it.

It's definitely worth taking another look at it. I find that I usually missed something the first go, or something makes more sense the second time around when attempting to reverse engineer a device.

Well don't hesitate to ask questions then!

I can recap it if you'd like, but I'm always afraid of talking down to people because it's just hard to know where everyone's skillset is at.

So the M+ uses a compute module… ie the main processor…. that's actually made from another manufacturer. It's designed to plugin to a corresponding slot. The idea is you as a company develop your product with this slot and then just buy and insert this CPU/processor module into your product.

So that's what NI has done. They made this M+ and the main processor is sourced from Conga… the company that makes this processor "module".

So I bought a development kit from Conga, which is basically everything you would need as a developer to start making a product/writing code for a specific processor.

This is a picture of the board that I bought. The processor "module" is a very small part of this kit. You can't really tell but it plugs into a slot in this board.

So basically I was hoping to just pull this processor card out of the Maschine+ and plug it into this development kit and get full access to everything. As you have probably guessed, that is not what happened lol.

So yeah like I mentioned in a previous post the main issue I has was that the display are very custom so since my development kit wasn't configured the same way a M+ was, I basically had no way to interact with the M+ in it's new development board home.

Hope that helps, but def feel free to ask questions. We're all here to learn!

-Tim

ok I see. What would you need to be able to see what’s going on inside the M+ module then? Would that be impossible to ”crack”? I’m guessing you want to see the software codes? And maybe play God with it and see what you can develop? :)

Of course! And yeah the main goal would be to get to play god, but that doesn't always work out.

So what I was thinking about doing is taking the eMMC which is an embedded MultiMediaCard, which is literally just a fancy version of an SDCard, just in a different physical case, and dumping the contents of that onto my computer for further study.

The biggest issue with that is once I remove that eMMC from the M+ it would no longer work. You can of course put it back on, but that is a lot more difficult to do than removing it. So there is a very small chance that my M+ would still work if I tried to remove and replace the eMMC.

So that's pretty much the main reason why I haven't just taken a hot air gun to my M+ and popped off the eMNMC. If I had better soldering equipment and/or was more versed at removing and replacing surface mount components, it probably wouldn't be too difficult but I don't do a ton of that so my skills are limited.

And well it's my personal gear lol not work stuff. There's no end to what I'll do if someone else paid for the kid lol but when it's my money, I'm a bit more reserved.

Cheers

-Tim

This is a pretty good overview of replacing an eMMC chip (or any other chip really for that matter)

Wow…you would be a very good teacher…

Even this curious kid THREE years of age understood…😂

Btw: if the goal would be to play god, there’s a new president around that could be a good teacher on that specific matter…😏