NUUG Meetup 2019-12-10: My personal fight against the modern laptop
Channel: NUUG
Date: 11/12/2019

Hamish Coleman presents.


    This talk will take you through some tools and techniques I used to reverse engineer the keyboard controller in my Thinkpad x230 laptop.


    I was driven to start this project when the laptops currently on sale just did not meet my requirements. Even the durable Thinkpad laptops I preferred in the past are being dumbed down. Eventually, I will need a new laptop - and with the available offerings, I just do not want anything that currently can be purchased off the shelf.


    To keep the project achievable, I reduced my gripes to just the keyboard - asking the question: "Can I shoehorn an older keyboard in a modern laptop?"


    Taking you through UEFI, ARCompact CPUs, Firmware Reversing, big structure dumping, SMM and custom virtual machines to answer that with "maybe."


    I hope to inspire others to address their hardware gripes too - and offer some tools and the confidence that they can.