IM-me wireless terminal

Thursday, 14th January 2010

A recent post on Hack a Day alerted me the to the IM-me, a device designed to be used with a web-based IM service that communicated with the PC via a USB wireless adaptor.

Pink!

According to Hunter Davis, the body of the messages were sent between the PC and the IM-me are in plain text. This sounded like a good start to me, so I picked one up from Amazon UK for £7.49 (they're now available for even less than that). You get a lot of electronics for that price; there's a CC1110F32 microcontroller inside (the chips inside the device and its wireless adaptor are clearly marked – no nameless blob of epoxy that you might have expected from the price) and Dave has poked around the insides of his and has mapped the contact pads exposed via the battery compartment to the debug port on the microcontroller. You could use this debug port to overwrite the stock firmware with your own if the fancy took you. However, I'm more interested in seeing what I can do with the device without writing my own firmware for it.

The wireless adaptor shows up in Windows a simple USB HID, so I installed SnoopyPro and logged a chat session with myself. Fortunately, there is indeed no obfuscation or encryption to the structure of messages. I have worked on a C# library that handles most of the different message types (no group chat yet, only direct contact-to-contact) and written up what I've found here. The C# code can be found here, though it is not especially robust yet.

im-me-chat-log.png

I think that my main problem is a poor grasp of asynchronous I/O. I read data asynchronously, but write synchronously, and don't currently do anything to protect against my code "speaking over" the incoming data. If you output data when the device is half way through sending a packet, it seems to ignore the data you're sending it. In the case of long messages, which are made up of multiple packets sent in rapid succession, they don't appear to ever reach the device. The USB device responds with a single 0 byte after a packet is written to it, which I don't currently wait for. I'm not sure how you can, when mixing asynchronous reading and synchronous writing, so if anyone has any suggestions or links to reading material I'd greatly appreciate it!

I have no intention of going near the existing IM-me web service – being able to use the IM-me as a general-purpose wireless terminal to talk to your own software opens up a wealth of possibilities. You could set it up to notify you of new emails, read RSS feeds, post updates to social networking sites, use it as a home automation console, remote control a media PC... You may wish to paint it black first, though!

Addendum: Whoops, after refactoring some code I broke the checksum generation. It appears that the IM-me ignores the checksum when receiving messages. I have stuck a brief pause between each byte written to the device and a slightly longer one between each packet sent to the device, and I can now send long messages to it.

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