Decompiling Software To Fix An Old Solar Inverter
It is a simple fact of life that electronic products come to be out of date following a handful of a long time. At times this is mainly because technology has moved on, but it can also happen that a perfectly practical gadget gets close to-useless simply because the primary manufacturer no more time supports it. When [Buy It Fix It] uncovered a pair of second-hand Electric power-One particular Aurora photo voltaic inverters, he ran into an problem for which he necessary access to the company menu, which took place to be password-secured. The unique producer had ceased to exist, and the latest operator of the brand name was unable to assistance, so [Buy It Fix It] experienced to resort to reverse engineering to find the password.
Thanks to the Wayback Machine over at the Web Archive, [Buy It Fix It] was in a position to down load the Personal computer computer software bundle that at first arrived with the inverters. But in buy to entry all characteristics, a password was essential that could only be attained by registering the unit with the company. That wasn’t heading to take place, so [Buy It Fix It] fired up dnSpy, a decompiler and debugger for .Internet plans. Just after a little bit of browsing he located the section that checked the password, and by simply copying that segment into a new application he was in a position to make his personal important generator.
With the services password now available, [Buy It Fix It] was capable to set the inverter to the suitable voltage environment and hook it up to his photo voltaic panels. Interestingly, the application code also had references to “PONG”, “Tetris” and “tiramisu” at various sites these turned out to be Easter eggs in the code, containing uncomplicated versions of individuals two games as properly as a image of the Italian dessert.
Within the program archive was also an additional software that enabled the programming of minimal-level capabilities in just the inverter, things that few customers would at any time want to touch. This application was not penned in .Net but in C or something identical, so it needed the use of x32dbg to search at the equipment code. All over again, this program was password-secured, but the master password was simply just saved as the unencrypted string “91951” — the very last five digits of the manufacturer’s old cell phone range.
The inverter was not in fact doing the job when [Buy It Fix It] 1st got it, and his mend movie (also embedded below) is also very well worthy of seeing if you are into ability electronics repair. Hacking solar inverters to empower extra functions is often probable, but of training course it is much simpler if the complete style and design is open up source.