Hi all,
I'm new to this forum so not sure if this is the sort of thing that interests anyone here.
I've recently repaired a Behringer DEQ2496 due to a failed power supply (bad caps and a failed TOP245 switching controller) and while I had it in pieces I decided to finally write a program to communicate with it over MIDI as I had been meaning to do for many years.
It turned out that Behringer's SysEx document for the DEQ2496 is mostly wrong when it comes to the firmware, so it look a bit of reverse engineering and disassembly but I finally got the unit to accept messages from me:
The code is written in NodeJS and is available on GitHub if anyone is interested. It's still incomplete at the moment but I hope to add a few more features to it. Contributions are welcome if anyone wants to add support for other devices!
It's been a bit of an adventure getting this far, figuring out all the undocumented things. The data blocks you send to the device are encrypted with the string "TZ'04" (I'm guessing the initials of one of the developers), and the 7/8 coding and "CRC" algorithms mentioned in the SysEx manual aren't widely used or documented anywhere. But after a few days of trial and error I got it to work!
There are hints in the firmware that there might be a few undocumented SysEx functions (mostly technical) and there seems to be a hidden hardware test mode that I'd like to figure out how to activate, just out of curiosity. Apparently (from the messages I found) it's got something to do with adjusting the VR1 potentiometer on the main board.
My goal is to see if I can get the unit to run my own firmware, just for the fun of it. I could never hope to reproduce the functionality of the official firmware, but it always struck me that the device seems under utilised, with all those extra push knobs and buttons that duplicate functionality. Perhaps if I get all the pieces in place, someone else might end up creating their own firmware for it. Apparently there are ports of Linux that run on the Blackfin processors used by the device, so although it would be completely pointless, part of me wants to get Linux to boot on it just to see if it can be done (might be a bit tight though as it only has 2MB of RAM.)
Let me know if anyone is interested in this sort of thing and I'll post updates if I have any successes.
I'm new to this forum so not sure if this is the sort of thing that interests anyone here.
I've recently repaired a Behringer DEQ2496 due to a failed power supply (bad caps and a failed TOP245 switching controller) and while I had it in pieces I decided to finally write a program to communicate with it over MIDI as I had been meaning to do for many years.
It turned out that Behringer's SysEx document for the DEQ2496 is mostly wrong when it comes to the firmware, so it look a bit of reverse engineering and disassembly but I finally got the unit to accept messages from me:
The code is written in NodeJS and is available on GitHub if anyone is interested. It's still incomplete at the moment but I hope to add a few more features to it. Contributions are welcome if anyone wants to add support for other devices!
It's been a bit of an adventure getting this far, figuring out all the undocumented things. The data blocks you send to the device are encrypted with the string "TZ'04" (I'm guessing the initials of one of the developers), and the 7/8 coding and "CRC" algorithms mentioned in the SysEx manual aren't widely used or documented anywhere. But after a few days of trial and error I got it to work!
There are hints in the firmware that there might be a few undocumented SysEx functions (mostly technical) and there seems to be a hidden hardware test mode that I'd like to figure out how to activate, just out of curiosity. Apparently (from the messages I found) it's got something to do with adjusting the VR1 potentiometer on the main board.
My goal is to see if I can get the unit to run my own firmware, just for the fun of it. I could never hope to reproduce the functionality of the official firmware, but it always struck me that the device seems under utilised, with all those extra push knobs and buttons that duplicate functionality. Perhaps if I get all the pieces in place, someone else might end up creating their own firmware for it. Apparently there are ports of Linux that run on the Blackfin processors used by the device, so although it would be completely pointless, part of me wants to get Linux to boot on it just to see if it can be done (might be a bit tight though as it only has 2MB of RAM.)
Let me know if anyone is interested in this sort of thing and I'll post updates if I have any successes.