4 ms·

Interview with chumby's former VP of Hardware

52 points by ptorrone 14y ago

gravitronic 14y ago
Andrew (bunnie) Huang is also the first person to hack the original Microsoft XBox. He wrote a book about it and it's a great read for software hackers wondering how a knowledgable person would go about hacking hardware. http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Xbox-Introduction-Reverse-Engineering/dp/B002YX0EN4 http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Xbox-Introduction-Reverse-Engi... He also has a pretty cool blog, although it's not always updated on time, he hosts a monthly contest called "Name That Ware" where he posts close-up pics of a circuit board (or chip xray) and people guess what it is. http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2328 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2328
- rosstafarian 14y ago
  Another of his hacks that i found quite notable was a man-in-the-middle attack on HDCP-secured connections to overlay video in any HDMI video stream and gave a nice talk about it.[1] [1]http://hackaday.com/2012/01/21/overlaying-video-on-encrypted-hdmi-connections/ http://hackaday.com/2012/01/21/overlaying-video-on-encrypted...
  - shabble 14y ago
    The neatest part about the HDCP hack is that all the overlay stuff is done on-the-fly in the FPGA, without any easy way to actually dump out the unencrypted content. That makes it much harder to use for actual DRM stripping, and thus easier to argue that it doesn't qualify as a DMCA circumvention tool.
joe_bleau 14y ago
Nice find! I was thinking today how I'd really enjoy reading some postmortems on Chumby. (My big regret is not having bunnie autography the Chumby he gave me as a "Name That Ware" prize.)
otoburb 14y ago
Maybe bunnie is interested in going to work for Per Vices. Those guys seem set on demolishing the world with their one-wireless-chipset-rules-them-all approach. Would be an awesome combination, especially given his previous learning experience at Chumby and his new open-source hardware platform that he's working on.
nickpinkston 14y ago
Shameless plug: see Bunnie (from this article) and other hardware startup guys at MAKE's Hardware Innovation Workshop http://makezine.com/hardware-innovation-workshop/ http://makezine.com/hardware-innovation-workshop/
joezydeco 14y ago
What a great, detailed interview. I have a ton of respect for Bunnie. His work on Chumby is miles beyond some of the other "open" projects like Raspberry Pi. His take on Kickstarter is wonderfully honest and refreshing as well: "Customers are sold on a vision, buy-in early on, and you have to deliver on that vision; in crowdsourcing your money, you’ve also crowdsourced your board of directors."

52 points by ptorrone 14y ago

Andrew (bunnie) Huang is also the first person to hack the original Microsoft XBox. He wrote a book about it and it's a great read for software hackers wondering how a knowledgable person would go about hacking hardware. http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Xbox-Introduction-Reverse-Engineering/dp/B002YX0EN4 http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Xbox-Introduction-Reverse-Engi... He also has a pretty cool blog, although it's not always updated on time, he hosts a monthly contest called "Name That Ware" where he posts close-up pics of a circuit board (or chip xray) and people guess what it is. http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2328 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=2328

rosstafarian 14y ago
Another of his hacks that i found quite notable was a man-in-the-middle attack on HDCP-secured connections to overlay video in any HDMI video stream and gave a nice talk about it.[1] [1]http://hackaday.com/2012/01/21/overlaying-video-on-encrypted-hdmi-connections/ http://hackaday.com/2012/01/21/overlaying-video-on-encrypted...
- shabble 14y ago
  The neatest part about the HDCP hack is that all the overlay stuff is done on-the-fly in the FPGA, without any easy way to actually dump out the unencrypted content. That makes it much harder to use for actual DRM stripping, and thus easier to argue that it doesn't qualify as a DMCA circumvention tool.

joe_bleau 14y ago

Nice find! I was thinking today how I'd really enjoy reading some postmortems on Chumby. (My big regret is not having bunnie autography the Chumby he gave me as a "Name That Ware" prize.)

otoburb 14y ago

Maybe bunnie is interested in going to work for Per Vices. Those guys seem set on demolishing the world with their one-wireless-chipset-rules-them-all approach. Would be an awesome combination, especially given his previous learning experience at Chumby and his new open-source hardware platform that he's working on.

nickpinkston 14y ago

Shameless plug: see Bunnie (from this article) and other hardware startup guys at MAKE's Hardware Innovation Workshop http://makezine.com/hardware-innovation-workshop/ http://makezine.com/hardware-innovation-workshop/

joezydeco 14y ago

What a great, detailed interview. I have a ton of respect for Bunnie. His work on Chumby is miles beyond some of the other "open" projects like Raspberry Pi. His take on Kickstarter is wonderfully honest and refreshing as well: "Customers are sold on a vision, buy-in early on, and you have to deliver on that vision; in crowdsourcing your money, you’ve also crowdsourced your board of directors."