A $150 portable spectrometer for sale on AliExpress looked promising to physicist and YouTube creator Chris, until he found that some features were arbitrarily blocked by the manufacturer to push customers towards more expensive product models.
Chris at first thought to reverse-engineer the serial data to access the missing features, but the spectrometer data was obfuscated.
He then decompiled the Android application and manually edited out the model number checks, allowing access to the locked down features, although he found some required additional hardware capabilities not available on the cheaper model.
Chris also found the pieces in the Android source code needed to understand how the serial data was obfuscated, leading him to create a Python library that lets users access the spectrometer’s features without relying on the manufacturer’s software.
