4 ms·

P2012 – ST's secret microcontroller

33 points by ot 4y ago

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Pretty wild how even basic sensors have CPUs with firmware running on them. I can imagine a side channel attack where you give inputs to the sensor that translate to machine code to exploit some weakness in that CPU firmware. What a time to be alive.
- tiagod 4y ago
  I wouldn't call the sensor mentioned in the article (8x8 60Hz TOF ranging sensor) simple...
ilaksh 4y ago
What is ST in this context? Apparently not Atari ST.
- wrigby 4y ago
  ST Microelectronics, a semiconductor manufacturer that is well-known for their microcontrollers.
fps-hero 4y ago
Modern sensors seem to quite useless with something able to crunch the numbers, so this is becoming increasingly common. TI’s mmWave sensors (IWR series) incorporate a top of the line C674x DSP core that is clocked at 600MHz.
DriftRegion 4y ago
The ever popular MPU6050 IMU from Invensense (Now TDK) contains a processor for fusing the output of the gyroscope and the accelerometer into an attitude estimate. Like the STxP70, this processor's firmware is a blob that's loaded over SPI/I2C on startup. There are a few versions of the blob floating around the internet and its features are anything but well-documented. Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66324744/setting-initial-values-for-pitch-and-roll-for-mpu6050-dmp-processing https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66324744/setting-initial...
SquibblesRedux 4y ago
"This hardware platform comes along with different simulators that allows to test parallel programs on regular computers. Both the hardware platform and the simulators are described in the following sections." [0] [0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Smart_Multicore_Embedded_Systems/zQ8JAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+STHORM+platform+is+a+high+performance+accelerator&pg=PA34&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/Smart_Multicore_Embedde...
- SquibblesRedux 4y ago
  The whole chapter, excluding the first page: https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-8800-2_3 https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-8800-2_3

33 points by ot 4y ago

Pretty wild how even basic sensors have CPUs with firmware running on them. I can imagine a side channel attack where you give inputs to the sensor that translate to machine code to exploit some weakness in that CPU firmware. What a time to be alive.

tiagod 4y ago
I wouldn't call the sensor mentioned in the article (8x8 60Hz TOF ranging sensor) simple...

ilaksh 4y ago

What is ST in this context? Apparently not Atari ST.

wrigby 4y ago
ST Microelectronics, a semiconductor manufacturer that is well-known for their microcontrollers.

fps-hero 4y ago

Modern sensors seem to quite useless with something able to crunch the numbers, so this is becoming increasingly common. TI’s mmWave sensors (IWR series) incorporate a top of the line C674x DSP core that is clocked at 600MHz.

DriftRegion 4y ago

The ever popular MPU6050 IMU from Invensense (Now TDK) contains a processor for fusing the output of the gyroscope and the accelerometer into an attitude estimate. Like the STxP70, this processor's firmware is a blob that's loaded over SPI/I2C on startup. There are a few versions of the blob floating around the internet and its features are anything but well-documented. Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66324744/setting-initial-values-for-pitch-and-roll-for-mpu6050-dmp-processing https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66324744/setting-initial...

SquibblesRedux 4y ago

"This hardware platform comes along with different simulators that allows to test parallel programs on regular computers. Both the hardware platform and the simulators are described in the following sections." [0] [0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Smart_Multicore_Embedded_Systems/zQ8JAgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+STHORM+platform+is+a+high+performance+accelerator&pg=PA34&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/Smart_Multicore_Embedde...

SquibblesRedux 4y ago
The whole chapter, excluding the first page: https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-8800-2_3 https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-8800-2_3