Making IOT Great Again

The talk follows a home EV charger sold mainly in Belgium and Luxembourg whose maker, Powerdale, went bankrupt in 2023. After the cloud platform was closed to its customers and a remote command limited the chargers to six amps, many owners were left with units that could barely charge a car. The presenters explain the three-part ecosystem of charger, phone app and cloud service, and why the official advice to scrap the hardware was costly and wasteful.

The presenters opened the device and mapped its radios and chips, then focused on the Bluetooth Low Energy link that the original app used. Drawing on public app builds and earlier community reverse-engineering work, they found that pairing depended on a PIN derived from the model and serial number printed on a sticker. They rebuilt the control logic on a low-cost ESP32 module and worked around its single shared radio, small task stacks and watchdog timers. The result is a local web interface that runs the charger without any cloud account, shown in a recorded demo with energy monitoring and charge history.

The talk closes with the decision not to publish the full code, since knowing the PIN would let anyone unlock other units. It then widens to similar cases of abandoned services and argues that connected products should keep basic functions working offline, expose local interfaces, and that firmware or source code could be placed in escrow. The practical takeaway is to design for the hardware's physical lifespan rather than the vendor's continued existence.