ProtoAI

GUI Interface Showing Interpreted Protocol
Hardware Setup of ProtoAI

Inspiration

As a team of mostly computer engineers, our team was excited to work on a hardware focused project for the hackathon. However, the Astera prompt left us stumped. We had a difficult time finding a way to combine hardware with AI in just 24 hours. After a lot of brainstorming, we decided on a project to assist newbie hardware developers. Any computer engineer was there at one point, trying to get a sensor to interface with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino. We wanted to build a solution to help in those situations.

What it does

ProtoAI is a desktop application that leverages generative AI to predict the higher level protocol behind a serial device. In simpler terms, ProtoAI allows the user to plug in a serial device (like a drone) and helps them understand the underlying communication protocol. This is especially helpful when the device's protocol is closed source, meaning someone can't see the actual code running on device without reverse engineering.

ProtoAI's user interface has two primary use cases:

Pure serial data can be displayed as packets on the left-hand side of the screen. In this way, ProtoAI can be used almost like a serial packet sniffer.
Once enough packets have been collected, ProtoAI sends the data off to ChatGPT. Chat can then process the packet data and give an excellent guess of what each packet and even the protocol could be. The user interface then updates with this new, much more readable, information alongside the raw packet data.