Hacking SCiO pocket NIR molecular scanner for scientific research

Development
1

Hello,

I have the SCiO v1.2 devkit, and am working with the scanner at a British university.

The scanner interfaces with a smartphone via Bluetooth to then connect to the internet for cloud data analytics and storage.
The issue is that the data is not available in raw format, which would be invaluable in benchmarking against other university equipment.
I have both Android and iOS mobile devices, as well as MacOS Windows 10/RT and linux devices.

Any help and suggestions are welcome with regards intercepting either bluetooth or WiFi communication for the data.

Thanks,

Student.

2

What implementation of BT? is it LE?

3

Have you tried to use wireshark? You can intercept the data in the stack waiting to be transmitted through the device as well as the packets as they are sent/recieved from the BT device. There is a steep learning curve though.

We use wireshark for dealing digital phone systems that are having issues with faxing. It isbour way of proving that anything other than FoIP is bad for faxes on such a system.

4

Is there a way to find out in Android? The device itself has no interface other than an illuminated button.
Due to the size (slightly bigger than a cheap lighter) i’d be inclined to say its BTLE

I’ll give wireshark an investigate.

5

I don’t know if it works on android. If you have a PC with a BT dongle, you may be able to intercept the BT packets in the air. You would need the MAC of each device to determine who is doing what.

6

Just shows what a piece of shit device it is and it’s creators are.

Full or even usable information from that, is not going to happen. It’ll probably send the information in some proprietary non-breakable, cryptic or understandable way.

Pulling cloud information, with no visible raw data and then claiming to be a, “Molecular Device” Wish it really was. Could be so useful for many things otherwise. The use cases with raw data, would be out of the world awesome.

7

Do go on? Any specific software for this? Wireshark seems to only work for direct bluetooth dialogues with my host computer and not my phone.

8

I have not gone too far in this. In my case, I was using a buetooth OBD 2 scanner with a raspberry pi and trying to log raw data from the coms.

I got the tip from an old episode oh Hak.5. It was one of the episodes dealing with the USB Swiss Army Knife.

9

Have a look at https://github.com/kebasaa/SCIO-read which documents the device’s specs in part. Not sure if reading the data will succeed, but maybe you can help this guy

10

Also, it documents how to read data on any bluetooth LE capable Linux device, just not how to decode it (yet)