Tag Archives: hacking

Sonicare UART

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The seal on my toothbrush failed and the driver isn’t working well anymore. I took it apart to see if I could fix it, but the driver is all corroded and is a model that’s not serviceable. Boo.

I figured I’d scavenge the battery. While I was looking at it, I noticed that there are UART and I2C pads. Interesting. I soldered on some wires on and tried the Flipper Zero UART console. Sadly, nothing lit up.

I wonder what a toothbrush has to say…
Maybe the dorkiest thing I did over break?

I hooked up my little oscilloscope and checked all the pins. The UART pins seem to be pulled high and the I2C pins seemed to float. There was no clock or anything that looked like signal. Strangely, the UART pin voltage was 4.7v.

I could mess around with it some more, but I think it’s probably just there for programming the chip though the board at the factory.

Dirty-PocketChip-wave M8

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Before I decided to buy the M8, I tried it “headless” with a Teensy for a while to see if I could figure it out. It worked well enough, but the whole point of the M8 is that it’s portable and fun. I thought I’d try to get it running on my PocketChip. It worked and it wasn’t even that bad to use. If I really wanted to I could have stuffed the Teensy into the Chip’s case and had a pretty decent portable experience. I even made a song on it.

I wrote a short readme and have the source on my GitHub. There’s also a pre-built binary if you have a Teensy and a PocketChip and want to give it a try.