Rainbow makes several different implementations of dongles, depending
on your desire for fanciness and the size of your budget.  If you
are a developer you can get demo keys and they explain how
they work.  But the key you have will have been "customized"
by the AutoCAD people, probably even to assigning which
pins take data and which clock them through, as well
as some cipher keys in the scrambling algorithm.  So the best
you could probably hope for is to be able to characterize
what comes back after you send something through it,
and use that to lock your software, without ever actually
learning anything about how the insides work.

You might do better to find someone who could use an extra
AutoCAD 13 key, and swap 'em for a PIC develpment kit and
then roll your own.

Barry

At 04:39 PM 8/1/01 +0100, you wrote:
>Hi folks,
>    I've just found an AutoCAD R13 dongle in the bottom of a box I got at a
>factory clearout sale. It's one of those Rainbow Sentinel devices and I
>can't tell what device is in it 'cos its a globbed die(it could be a pic ?)
>
>Anyone got and ideas as to how it works? Can I read/write it to and use it
>to protect any of my own software?
>I did a web trawl (a short one!) but came up blank. Has anyone got any info
>on these things?
>Best regards
>John

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics
(like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics