Image: reddit.com · Used Claude Code to reverse-engineer a proprietary binary format in one afternoon
A race car data recorder's binary format decoded
Claude Code and its owner spent about four hours working out Race-Keeper .rkd files so the video telemetry could be read on macOS.
Credits
- Reddit poster gorinrockbow Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
The full story
The poster had .rkd files from a Race-Keeper "Instant Video" race car data recorder, picked up at a track day five years earlier. The software is Windows-only and they are on macOS, so the telemetry had sat unused since 2021; they had tried to decode it themselves years before and failed.
They pointed Claude Code at the binary files and worked through the format together over about four hours in three sessions. Claude spotted patterns and proposed struct layouts, while the owner supplied context such as a car ID on the USB stick and a known top speed of around 160 km/h in an Audi R8, which Claude used to test and cross-check its guesses.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: Used Claude Code to reverse-engineer a proprietary binary format in one afternoonReddit poster: gorinrockbowPosted
The maker's post on r/ClaudeAI.
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