Contact with James Proud (www.sense.is)

[luc-ass]

Hey there,

I just contacted James Proud via E-Mail and he is willing to change DNS-entries for sense.is if we provide him with details so we can potentially start server communications. As I do not have really great expertise, I'd like to ask you wether this would be of any help.

Thanks and let's hope we can get this great piece of hardware to work again!

Lucas

[tshimkus]

I'm very much a novice at IoT applications and mobile app development but I may be able to lend a hand on the API side of things.

It may not be sustainable to host the app to operate over the cloud as it was during production. I imagine there was a steady bombardment of data streaming between mobile devices and Sense hardware.

Has anybody looked into running the application locally (end user mobile device and/or Sense device)?

[luc-ass]

My idea was, that as soon as we could get hold of a valid TLS 1.2 CERT, we could host a server and make a modified firmware available. One where you could actually specify a local host (i.e. docker container) to run sense - or just pull data from the device.

The sense has an 8GB flash card installed - so there should be more than enough space to store historical data if it doesn't need 5 sec granularity.

[MrTeal]

First of all, nice going! This gives me hope that the sense will become usable again.
Hopefully we don't need the app to install the new firmware though, it has been pulled from the App Store, at least on iPhone. I recently had to reinstall my phone and the app was no longer available...
But maybe it can be accessible from a (local) website or something.

[Firehed]

@luc-ass I think that approach could work well. If someone is able to modify (and presumably sign) the firmware to some sort of jailbroken version (if you will), hosting something shouldn't be too terrible, and getting SSL certs shouldn't be an issue if they are willing to update the DNS for us.

I'd be willing to host something if it's not resource-intensive (i.e. a firmware update manifest is probably fine, but definitely not the API backend), but I don't have the time or expertise to do any of the firmware modification stuff. If others are willing to figure out that side, let me know and I'll offer what I reasonably can.

[darthlotus]

Cant app be edited to be stand alone?
Remove login, wifi, and therein need for server an all that crap,
There are other apps out now that do all that monitoring, analysis stuff,
Most of us just want to be able to use the device, better a fancy alarm clock than an ornament

[jhoogeboom]

I'm a bit late to this party, have you considered re-flashing the main mcu with an edited version where the endpoints go to wherever you want? Except for time.hello.is they are even nicely grouped together: https://github.com/hello/kitsune/blob/6a28afa80dd4547907e58341a84bd0b5bec5d88e/kitsune/endpoints.h

Did anyone look into what is minimally needed to run the backend? Seems like quite a bit of services by the amount of repos.

[Qianli-Ma]

I'm a bit late to this party, have you considered re-flashing the main mcu with an edited version where the endpoints go to wherever you want? Except for time.hello.is they are even nicely grouped together: https://github.com/hello/kitsune/blob/6a28afa80dd4547907e58341a84bd0b5bec5d88e/kitsune/endpoints.h

Did anyone look into what is minimally needed to run the backend? Seems like quite a bit of services by the amount of repos.

Re-flashing the MCU by using jtag?

[jhoogeboom]

That could be an option, but I think they might have a UART on there that can be used to flash it? Anyway I should take a look at the schematics and do some testing.

[Qianli-Ma]

That could be an option, but I think they might have a UART on there that can be used to flash it? Anyway I should take a look at the schematics and do some testing.

Any updates by chance?

[jhoogeboom]

Nope, have to find some time, did you try jtag?

[jdtzmn]

@jhoogeboom it's nice to see some updates on this. If one of you managed to flash the firmware I would lend some time to the software side of things. Keep me posted- I really miss my sense.

[jhoogeboom]

Will let you know, cheers for lending some time on the software side of things. It looks like a decent bit of infrastructure, quite a bunch of (micro)services.

[MrTeal]

Came across my old Hello Sense Orb in a drawer and started looking if there was any progress on flashing it to add it to home assistant or something. Did you guys make any progress or has everybody given up on it?

[jhansche]

I got in contact with a former engineer, and he helped me put together a UART cable that works correctly to read the debug console and issue cli commands. He also helped me get my build environment set up and I was able to build the firmware image for flashing.

The problem now is I can't get the device to enter programming mode, following his recollection and reverse engineering one of their original dev cables, which has a switch on it to toggle between debug mode and programming mode. He tested the cable again on his own Sense and it still works, so I must be doing something wrong, or my cable or TTL chip isn't right.

If you have a newer firmware, there might be one command (x) that can be used to download a firmware image and store it into the correct flash location, but my firmware is old and doesn't have that command.

I haven't had time to get back to it since then. I was hoping to verify that I can recreate the programming cable, before putting together some instructions to add here. But since my cable doesn't work to enter programming mode, I haven't done that yet.

My plan was to add mqtt support to the device to add it to home assistant. But first I wanted to verify that I can flash it at all before I start doing that.