Claude code reverse engineered this RC car! It only worked with a custom wyze cam firmware, and now I can drive it over USB or a cheap ESP32

I need to point Claude at my Kia so I can stop paying $15 / month for remote start

KiaBoys 2.0

You've been back from vacation for like, a day, and you're already rippin! 🤣

did a similar thing with cheap led banner from china. The shipped a iOS app without APIs. i Wanted to control it from my telegram bots. Hacked with coding agents. My problem was even harder, the protocol was "encrypted".... was the protocol you "hacked" crystal clear? 😅

In this case yes! When I did the amaran lights it needed a key extracted.

ok, cool! then looking forward to see you proceed with this nice experiment :) does your card supports bluetooth or wifi? in the case of my led banners i had to constantly sniff the bluetooth traffic between my phone and the led and let my coding agents decode the bytes :) Keep us posted!

wouldn't usb tethering for an rc car kills the fun part like latency over serial?

>gave it the entire android app, and it decompiled. excuse me....

hell yeah. i love slapping esp32s on everything. good work

I bet @bijanbowen would like this.

Now give Claude the keys to the car. Boom. World's first RC car agent.

...I swear ...someone better not telnet into my RoboRock

i can't read code at all, shipped two ios apps just telling it what looked wrong. hardware was the one place i still assumed was off limits for me. not so sure after this

My Claude keeps restricting me when I try to reverse engineer something. Was trying a Bluetooth device the other day. Any tips for bypassing this?

Reverse engineering a physical device is a great agent test because the truth is outside the codebase. The same pattern extends to product work: after generating a solution, the agent still needs the right hardware owner, tester, or specialist to validate it in reality.

how’s this compared to your manual roomba hacking?

curious what kept it pushing after the public API dead-ended. my loops usually declare defeat at the first 403 unless something forces a second angle.

Hah I have one of those cars sitting on a shelf. Are you sharing your results?

Yeah I will post the code / findings

Awesome. I think I still have some of your old sticker pack in an envelope somewhere. I’ll have to put them on the car if I get it running.

Cool!

Wait it reverse engineered the firmware just from poking at it? That's wild for an RC car. What was the hardest part, the protocol or getting the ESP32 to talk to it?

The custom firmware detail is the part that caught my attention. An undocumented handshake can turn a quick experiment into a much deeper reverse-engineering job. Really cool result.

Now ask codex to do it too and you'll have your own trust me bro benchmark

Been there, done that. Now I can talk to my (closed-source no-docs-provided) VW computer through €10 ELM327 OBD2-bluetooth dongle from my java app.

Reverse engineering an RC car is peak Claude Code energy.

I one-shotted an ESP32-S3-CAM stack on an oddball board with a 30-line Grok prompt over breakfast this morning, just to see what would happen. It had to dig through datasheets, schematics, work out an odd io expander, all kinds of weird. First run worked. Wild.