Hacker News Reader

That seemed to match the lightbluetouchpaper description - the "hack chip" goes where the optional legacy (non-quad) SPI chip would go.

Given the size estimation, it wouldn’t cover the whole footprint.

But... why put it on an unpopulated footprint. Why not just replace the original Quad SPI IC with a backdoored device?

What do you then do when they upgrade/change the Quad SPI IC? A separate chip means a stable interface they can conform to.