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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  12hr ago (text post)   94 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 10th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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I had a smartwatch for tracking my running workouts. A.COROS Apex Pro. At some point I got the ick on these things because they ruthlessly mine your personal data. So I vibe coded a fitness app for my phone and just used that with a chest strap.

Most of the time that's fine but for specific workouts it's less than ideal because I'd like to glance at my wrist and see my pace or whatever.

I resolved to get an open source watch so I could upload my own firmware but the options have been... trashy.

Then Opus 5.5 came out and it seems that every watch is open source if you try hard enough. Within a weekend it reverse engineered the COROS smart watch's firmware and now I'm uploading my own very sick program to it for tracking my workouts instead.

I don't really love the idea of every one of these companies finally investing in solid device security to close this off long term, but for now I'm enjoying having freedom.

How difficult was it to access the watch firmware using Opus? It is absurd to me that it's even possible to do that, but the impact depends on how trivial it is to accomplish.

My agent wasn't cooperative at first so I switched to an account with cyber permission and told it (honestly) that I own the watch and I wanted to rid it of spyware, so it agreed to figure out how the android app did firmware updates. Then it analyzed a copy of the firmware on the Internet to figure out the hardware. Then we modified the stock firmware so it would dump the full contents of memory to an emmc if I trigger a key combination. With all of that it was able to write a detailed spec. Then I handed that off to my regular account and it happily iterated on building a new firmware from scratch.

Kind of surprised the smartwatch company didn't require signed firmware updates. Guessing that won't last very long. Which is ironic because I would happily keep buying their watches if I could continue flashing my own firmware.

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