Idea: OpenDeviceDB, a shared lookup before reverse engineering a device
A proposal for an opt-in database so people don't repeat the same device protocol work.
Credits
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The full story
REA made it cheap to recover a device's protocol, so many people now end up redoing the same work on the same abandoned drones, cloud-dead cameras and vendor-locked robots. OpenDeviceDB is an open directory, keyed by device model, that aims to stop that.
It pulls together existing community databases (OpenWrt, Zigbee2MQTT, Tasmota, ESPHome and others, about 11,600 devices so far). It adds what they don't track: who is working on a device, how far they've got, and whether it was tested on real hardware. Agents can query it through an MCP server, and contributors submit findings as pull requests. Firmware images, keys, DRM bypasses and safety-related functions are excluded.
How it was done
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Sources
An idea from the community, not a finished build.
- REA community: Avoiding duplicate device reverse engineering: an opt-in lookup before analysis (OpenDeviceDB)Repository account: morlutoPublished
The proposal and tool announcement, with how lookups and contributions work and the content policy.