Firmware reverse engineering

Is it humanly possible to decompile and customize/fix a firmware? Or the time spent isn't worth it?
I'm having issues with this piece of shit and Akai wouldn't answer.

Attached: akai-mpk-mini-mk3_1.jpg (700x445, 53.46K)

>Is it humanly possible to decompile and customize/fix a firmware? Or the time spent isn't worth it?
>I'm having issues with this piece of shit and Akai wouldn't answer.

You can always try. It's not like they're going to stop you from doing so.

But I don't think that would be very wise.

They have been known to ban people for trying to do just that.

>Is it humanly possible to decompile and customize/fix a firmware?
No.
>I'm having issues with this piece of shit and Akai wouldn't answer.
Next time buy a device that respects your freedom.

You can try binwalk to get a sort of grip on what is in a firmware, but that's the easy part, it gets harder after that

> Next time buy a device that respects your freedom.

You've obviously never tried to buy synths synths before and wanted to get them working on linux. Let me tell you is sucks balls, even decent quality (arturia) it hurts. I can get them to interface with my daw (waveform) fine, but I cannot simply configure midi banks, cause no software available

In theory I don't see why not, but the newer the electronics the harder it is. The basic idea is finding out what CPU(s) you're dealing with, then looking for ROM that have the firmware (and disassemble whatever is in the ROM). The thing is if it's new then it's all gonna be some surface mount nightmare and the important parts are under blobs of epoxy so you'll have to get creative.

lol banning me from where
I wish them existed, user, not a lot of musical open hardware (I think Monome is a example of a company that does it thing the right way)
yeah, the privative software thing for configuring banks also suck dirty balls for every controller I have owned.
I feel this hardware has so many potential but the firmware and the limitations of program/bank setup is just ridicolously limited.
I guess I will spend less time just building the shit from the ground up than solving problems lazy pasionless programmers don't fix.

i have the akai mpk mini

I was looking at this dood that did what you say:
https:// dsgruss.com/notes/2020/10/02/keystep1.html
but he has clearly way greater skills than I do and ever will

What's the point, it's just sending midi.
You can remap midi trivially

Bow.

Attached: mp11se.jpg (2048x982, 181.85K)

the problem it has is that when switching "programs"/banks, the device doesn't remember the value you left the knobs on. if you on bank 1, move knob 1 to 65, go to bank 2, get back to bank 1, the knob is again at 0. to fix this some DAWs as Ableton offer a "pickup mode" to pick the value and prevent jumps, but misterioulsy, this doesn't work either, the value just jumps back to 0.
as they're encoders, they offer a relative mode (it sends INC or DEC instead of an absolute value), but obviously the screen doesn't give visual feedback of the current value. I'm using it that way by now but sometimes something could go wrong (for example, you leave a filter closed) and you have no clue of what's going on.
are you happy with it? I really like the hardware but this problems just make it worthless
cute, but I'm a knob twiddler chad

The firmware works fine. You're just bad at setting things up.

It's possible but it requires levels of autism you probably don't have. Are you willing to learn assembly for obscure architecture? Are you willing to buy $1000 worth of hardware to screw with the hardware? Are you willing to risk your device being bricked?

Maybe you can replace the pcb with an arduino and write your own firmware? Or just build a MIDI controller from scratch, I mean that's probably a more productive use of your time

the idea seemed fun at first when it came to my mind, but you're completly right: just autist enough to get a grasp of what it would take
maybe the best idea.
or just fucking spending more money on better tools for my needs.

I have the same exact one, OP.
What are your issues with it?

...

Why do you even give a fuck about the shitty tiny display if you use DAWs anyways? Read what's on your computer monitor. The display on the MPK is a flashy toy at best.

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for permorming live, I midi map all it's knobs to a lot of FX racks and parameters on the synths. Ableton won't give focus to whatever you're tweaking, so the screen is pointless (I perform lid-closed)

>I perform lid-closed
Pretty sure they didn't design the MPK mini for anything advanced or semi-advanced. The "professional" on it is marketing.
It's alright for dicking some notes into your computer but don't expect it to be a true hardware (-like) controller type. You want some true midi controller for this shit and coincidentally products usually have some quirks that light users or amateurs don't notice (or mind) while musicians above that level get annoyed by it, so they move up the product ladder.

>The "professional" on it is marketing
>amateurs don't notice (or mind)
yeah, maybe this is just it, thanks user

I mean you can have that thing for 70 bucks. What did you expect.
It is absolutely great for that money though.

obviously, I'm pushing it to it's limits, but the issue I'm describing would make it 10x better, and it would be so simple to fix if we could tweak the firm. It's hard to find a box with just encoders (and banks) and that it behaves as you would expect (and giving visual feedback). I'm looking at Livid Code V2.