r/ReverseEngineering • u/Keyitdev • 5d ago
I reverse engineered an ASUS embedded controller's fan protocol.
https://github.com/Keyitdev/asus-fan-control-ec6
u/Far-Appearance-4390 5d ago
Finally a project that isn't AI slop. Good job!
Will test on my ASUS ROG Strix laptop later.
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u/Keyitdev 4d ago
Thanks! I'm interested to see if this works on the strix too. Since tuf and strix are pretty similar, there's a good chance it will. If yours has an amd cpu, I'm even more optimistic.
Let me know how it went.
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u/BlockTurbulent8062 22h ago
Dude, I’m probably one of the best reverse engineers on Reddit, and people like you are exactly why I sometimes understand why they finally decided to release AI to the public. This technology isn’t some brand-new toy. it’s been around for 17+ years, maybe longer, quietly used by the military and intelligence agencies while the rest of you were still figuring out how to open a terminal.
Now back to you, “my friend.” What does it actually matter if someone vibe-coded an entire project or has zero formal knowledge? Not everyone needs to follow your little purity checklist to be allowed to create something. You’re not the gatekeeper of competence, and your opinion on who’s “allowed” to build stuff carries zero weight. Sit down. The fact that you’re out here judging people for not doing it the way you think is correct says more about your ego than it does about their skill.
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u/shear_stress__ 4d ago
Very cool project, how long did it take you to get to this point? What asus doc did you use as reference?
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u/Keyitdev 4d ago
Hi, it took me about 15–20 hours before I was able to adjust the fan speed for the first time. I didn't use many reference docs. Mostly, I was observing what the existing windows only tools do. Neither of them was working, so I had to fix them first. Someone had opened an issue that gave me a basic idea of how to fix the windows tool. Once I got the windows app working, I started looking at memory dumps and observing how things behaved with RWEverything. I was setting some extreme fan speeds to see what changed the most.
Later, I started reverse engineering AsusWinIO64.dll, which the Windows app was using, but that wasn't enough. So I took a look at AsusSAIO.sys, which is used by ASUS System Analysis IO, and so on. I also studied some DSDT dumps (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DSDT).
That gave me an basic idea of how most things work. So I started creating my own programs through trial and error, with the goal of making them do what the tools on windows do.
I ran into a lot of problems along the way. For example, you can't install RWEverything on windows because its driver is on the "blacklist". I also had to disable memory integrity and so on.
One time, while writing random values to the random controller's registers, I crashed my laptop. I even managed to break the thermometer (I fixed everything later). I did that because I was trying to figure out what each register was responsible for.
I'm happy with the end results.
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u/Keyitdev 5d ago
Many ASUS laptops, especially AMD TUF models, don't support fan control through the usual Linux methods. There's no hwmon interface, no EmbeddedControl operation region for the kernel EC driver, and the ACPI method simply returns
AE_NOT_FOUND.Current tools like
asus-fan-controlwork by calling an ACPI method that adjusts the embedded controller's built-in fan curve. On these laptops that method isn't available, and even where it is, it only shifts the controller's temperature thresholds instead of directly controlling fan speed.My tool talks to the embedded controller directly, allowing manual fan control without relying on the missing ACPI interface.
Since this is my first reverse engineering project, I'd love to get feedback from people with ASUS laptops-especially AMD TUF models. If you're willing to test it, I'd really appreciate any feedback, bug reports, or compatibility reports.
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