That USB to CEC passthru box is $44.92 for reference. I do wonder what chipset it's using under the hood to do its thing, but given the combination of HDMI licensing/royalty fees, manufacturing tooling, the little custom enclosure it has (looks like molded/formed plastic, if I'm using the right term), then factoring in the low production volume, and considering that this seems to be a smaller operation... I think it's quite plausible the margin on the thing is quite small. Very plausible.

While on the page I was curious if the firmware was open source. While writing this and properly articulating the bit about HDMI royalty (and also just now realizing it might need to deal with HDCP... ah) I now realize the question is moot, but I didn't think of any of what while looking at the webpage, so I wondered if it would be interesting to have a cursory poke at the firmware download.

7-Zip (also available as a commandline program as p7zip-full on debian et al) is honestly grossly understated it its capabilities. I didn't feel like remembering how to invoke binwalk so tried `7z x firmware-v7.exe` almost as a bit of a challenge and it actually worked :)

$ 7z l ~/Downloads/firmware-v7.exe
Path = /home/i336/Downloads/firmware-v7.exe
Name = WEXTRACT.EXE .MUI
OS Version = 6.1
Image Version = 6.1
Subsystem Version = 5.0
Subsystem = Windows GUI
DLL Characteristics = Relocated NX-Compatible TerminalServerAware
Comment = FileVersion: 9.0.8112.16421
FileVersion: 9.00.8112.16421 (WIN7_IE9_RTM.110308-0330)
CompanyName: Microsoft Corporation
FileDescription: Win32 Cabinet Self-Extractor
----
Path = .rsrc/RCDATA/CABINET
Type = Cab
Physical Size = 1348694
ID = 7086

Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name
------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------
2016-04-13 13:05:12 ....A 184800 flash.exe
2012-08-29 16:19:56 ....A 619536 driver1.exe
2012-02-21 04:24:52 ....A 816224 driver2.exe
2012-07-31 15:35:30 ....A 400 flash.cmd
2012-03-10 11:27:28 ....A 67008 libusb0.dll
...

It output even more lines of metadata than I included. I removed probably 50% of output so as not to spam the subthread.

Awesome.

Hmm... what if I do the same to `flash.exe`?

$ 7z l flash.exe
...
Linker Version = 10.0
OS Version = 5.1
Image Version = 0.0
Subsystem Version = 5.1
Subsystem = Windows CUI
DLL Characteristics = Relocated NX-Compatible TerminalServerAware

Date Time Attr Size Compressed Name
------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------
...
..... 67392 67392 .rsrc/RCDATA/101
..... 2496 2496 .rsrc/RCDATA/102
...
------------------- ----- ------------ ------------ ------------------------
2016-04-13 22:05:07 183568 183568 9 files

HMMmmmm, RCDATA you say?

Extracting (`7z x ../flash.exe` from an empty subdir) produced newline-less ASCII hex output ("EF19541A19D258B099B877545DE0B65BBBC5602..."), so after a bit of `printf "$(cat 101 | sed 's/../\\x&/g')" > 101.bin` I came up with... nothing.

Binwalk has no idea what it is. Perhaps the start of the files ring bells for some humans?

$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 i336 i336 67392 Apr 13 2016 101
-rw-r--r-- 1 i336 i336 33696 Apr 1 05:46 101.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 i336 i336 2496 Apr 13 2016 102
-rw-r--r-- 1 i336 i336 1248 Apr 1 05:48 102.bin

$ xxd 101.bin | head -n 5
00000000: ef19 541a 19d2 58b0 99b8 7754 5de0 b65b ..T...X...wT]..[
00000010: bbc5 6020 54e7 ca9a 1fb7 beca 0a39 95c4 ..` T........9..
00000020: c876 de8a 4705 19a5 9f03 4c56 5d83 9550 .v..G.....LV]..P
00000030: f5ad 2930 5f07 9b46 21b1 91a0 d091 4685 ..)0_..F!.....F.
00000040: 3ada 0ce3 305b 49e1 939e 7384 3c5a 5794 :...0[I...s.<ZW.

$ xxd 102.bin | head -n 5
00000000: f3f1 7b55 3f33 cbed 426e 1ab7 5792 4425 ..{U?3..Bn..W.D%
00000010: 8e75 1566 5597 8183 c1ce 9265 6acf 3b73 .u.fU......ej.;s
00000020: 1370 47b4 5431 399b f73f 0f6a 6323 3329 .pG.T19..?.jc#3)
00000030: 0e52 25ad 0530 5d03 9393 bc8c 40c8 f0fb .R%..0].....@...
00000040: c63c 7ddb 4d3a cd89 ab4a e6c7 cb2f ab4f .<}.M:...J.../.O

For what it's worth, having realized this might be touching HDCP or for all I know might be an FPGA bitstream, I emphasize my interest is purely coming from a decidedly non-exhaustive sense of "ooh that's a cute product, I wonder what firmware it runs and how it broadly works internally" entirely made up of idle curiosity :)