Decompiling Software To Fix An Old Solar Inverter
It is a reality of existence that electronic devices develop into out of date immediately after a several many years. Sometimes this is because technologies has moved on, but it can also occur that a correctly useful product becomes near-worthless simply just because the original maker no extended supports it. When [Buy It Fix It] discovered a pair of next-hand Energy-A single Aurora photo voltaic inverters, he ran into an difficulty for which he wanted accessibility to the service menu, which took place to be password-protected. The primary producer had ceased to exist, and the present-day proprietor of the brand name identify was unable to aid, so [Buy It Fix It] experienced to vacation resort to reverse engineering to discover the password.
Many thanks to the Wayback Equipment above at the Online Archive, [Buy It Fix It] was ready to obtain the Personal computer software program bundle that originally arrived with the inverters. But in buy to access all features, a password was required that could only be obtained by registering the device with the manufacturer. That wasn’t likely to happen, so [Buy It Fix It] fired up dnSpy, a decompiler and debugger for .Net programs. Following a little bit of browsing he identified the segment that checked the password, and by merely copying that area into a new software he was able to make his personal essential generator.
With the provider password now obtainable, [Buy It Fix It] was capable to established the inverter to the suitable voltage location and hook it up to his photo voltaic panels. Curiously, the plan code also experienced references to “PONG”, “Tetris” and “tiramisu” at different places these turned out to be Easter eggs in the code, that contains easy versions of those people two games as nicely as a image of the Italian dessert.
Within the program archive was also a different program that enabled the programming of very low-degree functions inside the inverter, issues that couple of end users would ever want to touch. This program was not written in .Web but in C or some thing identical, so it needed the use of x32dbg to search at the device code. Again, this plan was password-guarded, but the grasp password was merely saved as the unencrypted string “91951” — the final 5 digits of the manufacturer’s aged cellular phone variety.
The inverter was not in fact functioning when [Buy It Fix It] 1st acquired it, and his mend movie (also embedded underneath) is also properly worth observing if you’re into ability electronics maintenance. Hacking photo voltaic inverters to enable more capabilities is typically doable, but of course it’s a lot less difficult if the whole style is open source.