Firmware on tsvinc

The pin template was for a different plug

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The smart plug's vendor app put its energy monitoring behind a subscription. The metering chip inside measures voltage alongside current and power all the same, whatever the app agrees to show. I wanted that voltage. Read off a plug on wall power, it says whether the grid is up, and my power-station UPS needed exactly that: a second opinion on the grid from something not behind a battery.

So the plug had to leave Tuya's firmware for OpenBeken, an open firmware for the Beken chips in most Tuya plugs. That took one evening. Getting the pins right took the next day, because the template I borrowed was for a different plug, and the plug's own leftover settings were the only thing that knew.

No BIOS image, so I diffed the NVRAM

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

flashrom got two attempts at the GEEKOM A9 Mega's SPI flash. Both were read-only: -r, run twice, so the two dumps could be hashed against each other before anyone trusted them. The package was Fedora 45's flashrom-1.6.0-6.fc45.

Attempt one, Secure Boot on. The kernel is in lockdown, and lockdown takes raw port I/O away from userspace: ioperm and iopl are on its refusal list. flashrom never reaches the chip.

Attempt two, Secure Boot off. flashrom runs, and names the chipset "AMD FP4". The CPU is a Ryzen AI Max+ 395, family 0x1A, model 0x70: Strix Halo. Whatever flashrom thinks it is talking to, it is not this. It fails to lift the ROM protection, changes nothing, and segfaults.