Thomas Flayols is reverse-engineering the proprietary motor driver for the Unitree GO-M8018-6 motors used in the Go2 quadruped robot. The process involved X-raying the PCB to identify unmarked ICs, establishing SWD/OpenOCD access to the Cortex-M0-based MCU, and extracting an encrypted firmware key from bootloader SRAM. With the firmware decrypted, an initial custom firmware has been developed with the goal of creating a fully open source replacement, which would free these capable motors from Unitree's ecosystem — especially relevant given recent malware and security concerns surrounding the Go2 robot's official firmware.
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