Unlocking a locked/deactivated e-waste Cricut Maker

The author rescued a discarded Cricut Maker whose rollers were damaged and whose firmware reported “Machine deactivated.” By capturing USB CDC traffic with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 acting as a proxy, they rewrote the serial-number packets, allowing the cutter to register and function normally after installing new rollers. This hardware-level hack demonstrates that the device’s activation check relies on unencrypted USB messages, which can be bypassed without modifying the machine’s firmware.