standing-desk-interceptor

I wanted to intercept the communication between my Flexispot E5B standing desk buttons. This is the progress on the project. It should work on any other flexispot desk as well, as i suspect they use the same button interface with nearly the same protocol. But this needs testing!

RJ45 Pins

PIN	Colour	Name
1	brown	RES
2	white	SWIM
3	purple	?
4	red	WAKE
5	green	RX/TX (cp/mc)
6	black	TX/RX (cp/mc)
7	blue	GND
8	yellow	VCC

Using SWIM

The SWIM Debug interface is on the RJ45 Port, but not possible to use, due to set Read Protection, which can only be disabled by overwriting the Chip itself.

Protocol

Every Command starts with 0x9b and ends with 0x9d. The second byte is the length of the Message with the Endbyte included. It seems like the Byte after the length is some kind of messagetype, because it stays constant for button presses, height configuration and different messages.

Start Byte	Length	Type	Payload	Checksum	End Byte
9b	06	02	00 00	6c a1	9d
9b	07	12	06 06 7d	38 b7	9d
9b	04	11		7c c3	9d
9b	04	13		bd 42	9d
9b	04	15		bf c2	9d

The checksum is a CRC16 Modbus Checksum (07 12 06 06 7d results in 0x38b7) over the Length+Type+Payload

Button presses

A button press has the message type 0x02 and can be used as a fixed command. The checksum is steady and doesn't have to be recalculated.

Those are the known commands from the button controller to the motor controller with their respective button names.

Start Byte	Length	Type	Payload	Checksum	End Byte	Name
9b	06	02	01 00	FC A0	9d	UP
9b	06	02	02 00	0C A0	9d	DOWN
9b	06	02	04 00	AC A3	9d	M1
9b	06	02	08 00	AC A6	9d	M2
9b	06	02	10 00	AC AC	9d	M3
9b	06	02	20 00	AC B8	9d	M

Height

(Credit goes to mikrocontroller forum https://www.mikrocontroller.net/topic/493524)

The height has the MessageType 0x12 and the payload is a simple 7 Segment display output.

As an example we look at the height answer: 9b 07 12 06 06 7d 38 b7 9d which represents 116

P1	P2	P3
06	06	7d

If we convert this to a regular 7 Segment Display:

	a	a	a
f				b
f				b
f				b
	g	g	g
e				c
e				c
e				c
	d	d	d		dp

Converting each byte to is binary representation and mapping each bit to a segment, we can generate the following table:

Name	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	dp
P1	0	1	1	0	0	0	0	0
P2	0	1	1	0	0	0	0	0
P3	1	0	1	1	1	1	1	0

Mapping this to the example above we can display the number 116 as a 7-Segment output. (don't want to include pictures, just believe me or try it out)

Unkown MessageTypes

We don't know about the MessageTypes 0x11, 0x13, 0x15. They are send by the motorcontroller. They seem to be constant across different tables and don't bear any payload.