Reverse engineering the Creative Katana V2X soundbar

Article excerpt

Rasmus Moorats recently purchased a Creative Sound Blaster Katana V2X soundbar (what a mouthful) to replace old, cheap Logitech computer speakers. After arriving, I set it up and realized it had an USB port which, aside from being able to use it as an audio input, allows the user to configure the speaker: Set the EQ, set the LED lights in different modes, etc. The unfortunate part of this was the fact that it requires the (proprietary) Creative App to use. What’s more, it only seems to be available for Windows, which I don’t use. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for something I love: Reverse engineering proprietary applications, devices and protocols and writing tools to communicate with them. See the reverse engineering methodology in the post here.