Hardware Project XZZ's Switch Boardviews Cracked!

[embern]

This is absolutely insane, the fact this only has 11 likes, a few comments, and maybe 250 upvotes on reddit is absolutely wild. You have literally cracked the (probably) biggest deposit of schematics online and made it open source for anyone to use, and the first comment you get is "so what is this for".

This should have hundreds of comments and way more upvotes and shit. I'm glazing hard but you have literally made repairs easier for thousands of people without having to pay. Lots of these schematics could be found basically nowhere except some basic screenshots for YEARS. I'm seeding this torrent and backing up these files on like 3 different drives

As someone who does a combo of electrical engineering/programming, well done man. Hope you're getting crazy rep in your friend circles and communities.

 

[l7777]

This is absolutely insane, the fact this only has 11 likes, a few comments, and maybe 250 upvotes on reddit is absolutely wild. You have literally cracked the (probably) biggest deposit of schematics online and made it open source for anyone to use, and the first comment you get is "so what is this for".

This should have hundreds of comments and way more upvotes and shit. I'm glazing hard but you have literally made repairs easier for thousands of people without having to pay. Lots of these schematics could be found basically nowhere except some basic screenshots for YEARS. I'm seeding this torrent and backing up these files on like 3 different drives

As someone who does a combo of electrical engineering/programming, well done man. Hope you're getting crazy rep in your friend circles and communities.

Yes it's sad that we have to wait for things like this to happen in order to make proper repairs to modern equipment. Any owner of the equipment should have access to these even if only to hand it to a repair person.

 

[chrisrlink]

it's sad how right to repair always get fought over when a law from the 70's spell it out clearly (in the US) also i though the ftc got on the big 3's assess about said law and forced them to comply (I mean i get they will lobby in the 2nd trump admin to (Possibly) repeal that 70's law but still they were non compliant with the lawsuit, also good work

 

[SorataVP69]

I am trying to open the boardview application on Windows 11 with wsl and I have a problem. I clarify that I have never touched Linux in my life. Is there a way to open the app?

Post automatically merged: Dec 26, 2024

After hours trying to get everything working (I had never touched Linux and thanks to this I learned several things) I was able to open the program but I couldn't open the .pcb file, what did I do wrong?

 

[l7777]

I am trying to open the boardview application on Windows 11 with wsl and I have a problem. I clarify that I have never touched Linux in my life. Is there a way to open the app?

Post automatically merged: Dec 26, 2024

After hours trying to get everything working (I had never touched Linux and thanks to this I learned several things) I was able to open the program but I couldn't open the .pcb file, what did I do wrong?

For Windows and WSL, Get the Ubuntu package from the Windows App Store running then run the below commands:

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install git build-essential cmake libsdl2-dev libgtk-3-dev
• git clone --recursive https://github.com/slimeinacloak/OpenBoardView.git
• cd OpenBoardView
• git checkout xzz-pcb
• ./build.sh
• ./openboardview.sh

OpenBoardView should now be able to read the *.pcb files.

 

[Sjohnson1021]

Over the past couple weeks myself and a few people have been able to crack XZZ's file format and encryption, of these files the switch boards that previously were locked behind a $40usd/month are now public and viewable to all (also all other XZZ pcb files but that is more of a badcaps post and I am personally invested in having the boardviews for the switch models so)

Full support in the main OBV repo soon once I cleanup the code and make a PR :3

(Edit now that I can add links)
My dev fork: https://github.com/slimeinacloak/OpenBoardView/tree/xzz-pcb
File format decoder for those curious: https://github.com/slimeinacloak/XZZPCB-ImHex

Switch boardview files are in the example pcbs folder on the XZZPCB-ImHex repo (files dont need to be decrypted before opening with OBV fork)

Badcaps post (has zip of dump):
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/docum...2-drone-game-console-boardview-files-from-xzz

View attachment 473736View attachment 473738View attachment 473737

Not sure if anyone else will find this useful, but I went through the process of aligning the board images and scaling/offsetting in OBV to get the board image of the HAC-CPU-20 pcb lined up with the matching components and pads (as best I could be bothered to at like 3am). Thought I'd share in case anyone found it helpful.

not sure if I can upload the conf file here, so..
File.io (is that okay?) link: [dead link removed]

Attached .zip contains 3 files:
'HAC-CPU-20 image-sbs.jpg' [side by side board-scan image]
'HAC-CPU-20 PCB layer.conf' [text file with scaling/offset values, etc]
'HAC-CPU-20 YiDianTong(Diode value).conf' [^^^]
(.jpg and .conf files to be placed inside 'Gaming Consoles/Nintendo/SWITCH NS-HAC-CPU-20' alongside the 'HAC-CPU-20 PCB layer.pcb' & 'HAC-CPU-20 YiDianTong(Diode value).pcb' files)

 

[l7777]

I am trying to open the boardview application on Windows 11 with wsl and I have a problem. I clarify that I have never touched Linux in my life. Is there a way to open the app?

Post automatically merged: Dec 26, 2024

After hours trying to get everything working (I had never touched Linux and thanks to this I learned several things) I was able to open the program but I couldn't open the .pcb file, what did I do wrong?

FlexBV Free also supports the XZZ files now.

https://pldaniels.com/flexbv5/free.php

 

[slimeinacloak]

I wrote a script to pull out all the diode measurements from the PCB files and convert them to OBData format which is viewable in FlexBV

 

[Sjohnson1021]

I wrote a script to pull out all the diode measurements from the PCB files and convert them to OBData format which is viewable in FlexBV

View attachment 482553

You're a legend.

 

[l7777]

I wrote a script to pull out all the diode measurements from the PCB files and convert them to OBData format which is viewable in FlexBV

View attachment 482553

Is the trace data in XZZ files as well?

 

[Sjohnson1021]

Is the trace data in XZZ files as well?

There's a possibility that there is other [useful/meaningful] data, but the file format is a mess, and obviously not documented (was obfuscated/encrypted). Will mean digging through hex for the foreseeable future, and not really any guarantee they do. Anyone here have experience using the XZZ tool (actually paying the subscription) know what all data/features it had, so we had a better idea whether or not it was worth continuing to dig, or if there was anything there (when using XZZ's tool) that wasn't available or found elsewhere in resources/documentation etc, as scattered as that may currently be?

 

[l7777]

There's a possibility that there is other [useful/meaningful] data, but the file format is a mess, and obviously not documented (was obfuscated/encrypted). Will mean digging through hex for the foreseeable future, and not really any guarantee they do. Anyone here have experience using the XZZ tool (actually paying the subscription) know what all data/features it had, so we had a better idea whether or not it was worth continuing to dig, or if there was anything there (when using XZZ's tool) that wasn't available or found elsewhere in resources/documentation etc, as scattered as that may currently be?

My curiosity comes from a repair video I saw Sthetix do. He was tracing out problems from the USB port and actually had the traces shown.

Link

Schematics referencing XZZ shown at 5:37 if the link doesn't directly take you there.

 

[Sjohnson1021]

My curiosity comes from a repair video I saw Sthetix do. He was tracing out problems from the USB port and actually had the traces shown.

Link

Schematics referencing XZZ shown at 5:37 if the link doesn't directly take you there.

Interesting, had never actually seen the 'XZZ platform' in use before. Do OpenBoardView/FlexBV even support board layers/traces? I haven't seen it mentioned or used in either. Would definitely be a cool feature (read: fairly massive development project, .. scope creep) of the viewer applications.
Not to mention a massive headache to try and guess/search/find where/if that data is stored in the .pcb file, how to extract it into a useable format, etc.

 

[l7777]

Interesting, had never actually seen the 'XZZ platform' in use before. Do OpenBoardView/FlexBV even support board layers/traces? I haven't seen it mentioned or used in either. Would definitely be a cool feature (read: fairly massive development project, .. scope creep) of the viewer applications.
Not to mention a massive headache to try and guess/search/find where/if that data is stored in the .pcb file, how to extract it into a useable format, etc.

Just educating myself on board views and tools so I didn't know if the trace layout was common or not. In most other diagnostic videos I've only seen lines connecting points on the board just as OBV/FlexBV show now. Sounds like the trace layout might be specific to XZZ's platform.

 

[slimeinacloak]

The XZZ files do have the trace layers for some files like the OLED that they made in some internal software, I have been able to extract the individual layers however the issue is that openboardview and FlexBV dont have any support for layers so rendering them is a pain, especially trying to highlight a trace based on a net would require a large amount of work to implement in OBV and due to the very limited number of files with layers Paul Daniels has said he won't put the time into adding to Flex BV.

(edit added a couples screenshots from Paul and I's dms when working on the format decoding)

 

[l7777]

The XZZ files do have the trace layers for some files like the OLED that they made in some internal software, I have been able to extract the individual layers however the issue is that openboardview and FlexBV dont have any support for layers so rendering them is a pain, especially trying to highlight a trace based on a net would require a large amount of work to implement in OBV and due to the very limited number of files with layers Paul Daniels has said he won't put the time into adding to Flex BV.

(edit added a couples screenshots from Paul and I's dms when working on the format decoding)

Excellent work anyway. We have the far more than we had before your work on decoding these and the diode values. Thank you again!

Adding the resistor/capacitor and other common component values/part numbers is all I can think of that could make this more valuable. The "What's this component?" thread might quiet down then.

 

[slimeinacloak]

@Sjohnson1021 was looking at doing that exact thing

 

[karatefeet]

This is amazing! Been waiting for this for so long.

I'm getting the following error when doing the build step. Not sure if it's because I'm using Apple silicon?

ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture x86_64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
make[2]: *** [src/openboardview/openboardview.app/Contents/MacOS/openboardview] Error 1
make[1]: *** [src/openboardview/CMakeFiles/openboardview.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2
MAKE INSTALL/STRIP FAILED

 

[slimeinacloak]

I just tried building on my M1 and after fixing the type casting issues it seems to be an issue with SDL2 or the default SDL2 config, I remember this issue from something else I tried to compile on my laptop and ended up just using a intel mac to cross compile.
Without an intel mac or working out the compiling issues the easier option is just using FlexBV, when I have more free time in my personal life I will probably fix the issues with the file format and resubmit the PR

 

[karatefeet]

I just tried building on my M1 and after fixing the type casting issues it seems to be an issue with SDL2 or the default SDL2 config, I remember this issue from something else I tried to compile on my laptop and ended up just using a intel mac to cross compile.
Without an intel mac or working out the compiling issues the easier option is just using FlexBV, when I have more free time in my personal life I will probably fix the issues with the file format and resubmit the PR

Thanks for the quick reply. I do have access to an Intel Mac so will give it a go. I did try FlexBV but it didn't seem to have as much detail as the pics in your first post. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong but when I selected a pad ie Dat0, it didn't link to the other points.