Modder Joshua Kennedy has finished a nine-year Xbox 360 hardware project using a Raspberry Pi Pico that costs about $4. The approach builds on the CPU force-reset exploit first revealed in 2011, which normally required specialized glitching hardware. Kennedy had bought a Matrix Coolrunner Rev D modchip board in 2017 but put the project aside after struggling with soldering, NAND programmers, and patience.
The Raspberry Pi Pico changed the workflow. Kennedy connected it to the console's NAND interface header and used the PicoFlasher utility to dump the NAND firmware. Tom's Hardware notes that Kennedy likely then patched the data with XeLL and reuploaded it, though the original post does not say so explicitly. He also used the Pico to upload Octal450's Timing Files to the Matrix Coolrunner, which trigger the reset glitch at the precise nanosecond-scale timing needed for different Xbox 360 hardware revisions.
The glitch works by sending a tiny signal to the CPU's reset pin, causing the CPU to execute the current instruction incorrectly and ultimately allowing arbitrary code to run. Tom's Hardware observes that a separate persistent soft-mod, PeerPressure, appeared last week, but this particular hack stands out because a commodity microcontroller made a formerly demanding hardware mod far more accessible. As the source puts it, a project that defeated Kennedy in 2017 was made trivial in 2026 by a £5 microcontroller.