Ryan Mast
Ryan is a software engineer working on open source projects to make the electric grid more reliable. His interests include software security, niche video games, poking at random "smart" devices, and reverse engineering audio/video hardware used in live productions.
Session
Have you ever gone to make a smoothie, only to have the blades spin fruitlessly while the fruit sticks just out of reach on the walls of the cup? I’ve wrestled with a “smart” blender over this and other issues on many occasions, often resorting to tossing the single serving cup to dislodge stubborn pieces of fruit. Or perhaps you have another smart device that one day stops working because the vendor decided to stop updating the app for newer phones.
In this talk, I’ll share how I learned to reverse engineer BLE (bluetooth low energy) devices in order to control the exact settings used by the blender, including initial failures and how I overcame them -- along with quickly creating an alternative for controlling the blender when the app stopped working after an iOS update. And in the end, we’ll create a custom blending profile for the perfect blend!