IDA Firmware Reverse Engineering how-to

This video goes into every step in Realtime included to get the screen of the 30€ Spot Welder rotated by 180° as being annoyed by and talked about in this first video:
• Is the 30€ Spot Welder...
Get it here for sometimes as low as 26€ from Aliexpress:
s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_DmP...
Follow me on Twitter: / atc1441
( Of course there might be better, faster or different solution go get there or use IDA! this is just my way :) )

[@fr3zer677]

Real men don't read instructions. They reverse engineer the firmware to gain all the knowledge they need.

[@Katchi_]

And yet you are still a loser. Mean while the rest of us read.

[@Prophes0r]

Macho bullshit. And wrong too. Aaron clearly read many MANY directions during this process. What else would you call the datasheets that explain how to use the chips?

[@mvadu]

A real pro at work.. The ease in which you connected your prior knowledge of the display working and the UI you saw, and to the decompiled (which is just gibberish) code is amazing..

[@MaxWithTheSax]

I was expecting this but not so soon. Great job

[@beartastic-ftw]

.. not so soon and not so comprehensive! However I'm not complaining!!!

[@alfankosh1]

Perfekt Aaron

[@theelmonk]

It's an excellent and instructive walkthrough, thank you. The feature is described in the manual that came with my welder : a line of red text almost at the end of section 5. I can't see a revision number for the manual but I bought it just after seeing your first video.

[@woolfy02]

Its amazing how you make everything look so simple to mod! Ive tried to work on simple devices like diabetic meters and things like that, though uart / jtag etc etc. Wish i could send you some devices, just to see you hack them haha. Very impressive.

[@mugosquero]

This is a very informative video and thank you for sharing it with us. Great content, keep uploading.

[@4fff618]

really nice walk trough, you knowledge in electronics and disassembly is awesome!!!

[@hiteshhere]

I've this same welder for a while now and was not aware of the feature!! Thanks much for making this video mate. 😄

[@bactoto]

Awesome video. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge! ❤

[@russiancybercheck]

This kind of approach works for just about everything. For example, when I was fixing the microwave.

[@roidaniel10]

Great content!

[@ericfrazer4736]

cool vid, thanks!

[@thrnwggrs]

Nice, I have that exact spotwelder, and the AliExpress listing mentioned screen rotation, but not how to archieve it. The included instructions don't mention it at all. I've searched every menu on the device, could not gind anything.... Finally I can read the screen while working 😂

[@oleksii.zagorskyi]

I just started to watch and smashed the like button right away !

[@avramitra]

Yeah! Exactly what I wanted. Thanks for hacking it :)

[@bourbon3406]

This is amazing! Thank you so much.

[@s000x]

great video man

[@Metaln00b]

Press the white and black button to rotate the screen 😅

[@MakenModify]

Let me just quickly dump my manual 😅Great video. 👍

[@medienmond]

IDA just told you: RTFM!

[@IndianTinker]

Wonderful!

[@Beatfreak19831]

Amazing!

[@HammondOfTexas0]

I'm just going to be amazed that a spot welder has a color screen and an orientation sensor.

[@rssszz7208]

This video is suggest to me and it's good

[@kadircinkaya]

💯

[@bschwand]

the hxd and hex listing copy paste etc. might be confusing to newbies. you do not need to do that, you can just grab the flash content and dump it to a file. with openocd for example it's a one-liner command. Also, for those who do not want to pay or get a pirated copy of IDA, you can use ghidra to do that same disassembly for free.

[@atc1441]

Everything correct :)

[@bschwand]

@@atc1441 thanks, just thought of something else for beginners: - when you have experience you have the feel for what binary actually is, wether code, strings, just data, etc. But before you get that experience, it's easy to misidentify pieces of binary and end up with very strange (incorrect) disassembly. I find it very important to read the microcontroller's datasheet thoroughly and make absolutely sure the interrupt vector table and initial code entry points are correctly identified and disassembled. Then the disassembler can do it's job easily and you can trust it. - the peripheral registers, DMA controllers and such have fixed addresses (listed in the datasheet) and initial state at reset that can be searched for and often found in the code. Those are patterns useful to identify what part of the code does what. - this example is very good as we see your work in real-time, but I think it gives a very optimistic view of reverse engineering. In my experience, sometimes it may take days of digging to get to the place you got in an hour, with large, complex or obtuse code... nice video !

[@SomeoneBloodyRandom]

Not watched it yet, so gonna guess the plot twist. There was a way to set the rotation of the screen in software but its buried so deep / undocumented you didn't discover it until you hacked the device! EDIT: CALLED IT!!!

[@atc1441]

Yep 100 points :)

[@Metaln00b]

😂 Ist nicht dein ernst 😂

[@osamashokry4524]

you could simply flip the actual lcd on the device😅 Great work though loved it keep sharing great content🤍