Yet another question about disassembling sketch

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello. Sorry if this is this is a wrong category, please remove if so.

So, I'm a Python web developer with general C knowledge who got pulled into Arduino microcontroller programming by my engineer friend. After starting working with Arduino, I've watched and read a lot of tutorials and articles, including this forum, and I know that it's pretty much impossible but still.

So, we have this Arduino Pro Mini 168 (Atmega168P) that has this complicated sketch uploaded on it. I'm using Win 10 via FT232RL converter, by the way. I'd rather just rewrite the sketch but my above mentioned friend asked to look into the possibility of copying and modifying it.

What I did was learning how to get hex file from the chip using avrdude, and dump it using avr-dump. Both files look like some random assembly with some empty space in the middle.

Now, I don't know assembly (yeah, that's a big con, I know), so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do next. I read somewhere that Microchip Studio may help me so I installed it, but I'm not sure what to do next.

My goal is to turn it into C, without any original names or structure, just for it to be somewhat readable so I can recompile it.

I understand this is probably not possible, but if it is, please let me know what my next steps should be. Any advice or suggested readings would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks!

2

I have seen it de compiled into assembler but not into a higher level language.

3

I do not believe that is possible although you can reload the hex file (without modification) to another Arduino Pro Mini 168.

Likely to be the only way.

4

good luck

5

Ghidra is a good reverse engineering and decompiling tool, and it's free :slight_smile:

7

What does the sketch actually do? To rewrite it accurately generally requires a complete description of all the possible inputs and outputs.

Keep in mind that the original code may have errors.

8

Likely to be the only way.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

10

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