Category Archives: Electronics

Consumer electronics, portables, whatever

Electronics, Rockbox

Sansa Fuze AMS reuse

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Anythingbutipod.com published a Sansa Fuze disassembly today and allow me to offer a visual comparison of the SanDisk-branded main chips in the Sansa Fuze (top) compared to the one in the Sansa e280 v2 (bottom):

Sansa Fuze chip branded SanDisk

SanDisk marked chip, an AMS AS3525

And since we know the e200v2 one is an AS3525, there is little doubt that the Fuze one is as well. Of course we can confirm this for real once we get our hands on a firmware update file for the Fuze – I’m not aware of the existence of any yet at least.

So where does this put the Fuze Rockbox-wise? About at the same position all the other “Sansa v2 architecture” targets: we basically know the firmware file format, we have data sheet for the AS3525 but there aren’t any particular efforts going on and we don’t know if they have any means to recover from being flashed with a broken firmware!

Update: because some less intelligent people decided that facts I wrote in this article back in 2008 would still be the truth several years later, I urge you all you check the date for things your read on the internets. And in this particular case, Rockbox runs very good these days on several SanDisk players that use the AMS chipsets. See the http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaAMS page for details

Electronics, Linux, Open Source

Neuros OSD 2.0

For you who are into things like open source hardware for your videos, it can be interesting to note Neuros‘ recent posting of their planned specs for their upcoming OSD 2.0 player that I guess then will replace the current Neuros OSD model.Neuros OSD 2.0

In hard techy interesting terms: they plan to upgrade to Texas Instruments Davinci 6446 chipset, which is a 300MHz ARM9 with a C64x DSP core embedded. Pretty much like the existing DM320 one, but it seems with a great deal of more horse power under the hood. Given their specs paper, it will support a lot of formats and at least partially up to HD resolutions. It’ll also support internal harddrive and offer 256MB RAM and 256MB internal NAND flash.

Personally I don’t care that much as I don’t even have analogue TV and don’t download/have many movies to watch and my existing DVB-T box has fine recording abilities and my DVD is good enough for my kids to repeatedly watch the same animated films over and over and over…

Oh btw, if this sounds like your kind of backyard and other things combine well, Neuros is hiring Linux developers for what I believe is this hardware.

(sorry for the crappy quality of the pic but I nicked it from the PDF)

Electronics, Rockbox

Secrets are hard to keep

On the web, it seems more or less everything is eventually getting out and gets accessible for people to download and see. You can fight hard and make a real effort but as we keep seeing, lots of secrets get revealed in the end anyway.Data Sheet for a technical thing

The other day a friendly fellow joined the Rockbox IRC channel and pointed out a russian site full of iriver goodies such as service manuals, firmwares and perhaps most importantly: circuit diagrams for just about all (somewhat older) iriver models, including the H10, H100, H300 series and more.

I wish we had these before when the Rockbox ports for these targets were younger, but I’m sure they’ll still come handy to some people now as well.

(Now I won’t reproduce the link here just to not make the traffic too hard on that site and to avoid getting into problems for linking to content that is clearly dubious legal-wise, but you don’t have to be a genius to find the link yourself.)

Electronics

Tonium’s Pacemaker has little point

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I happened to read an article on idg.se (in Swedish) that talks about the people behind the company Tonium and their portable music device called “Pacemaker“.the pacemaker

The description on the site says: “the world’s first pocket-size DJ-system – a superior portable music player enabling the playing of two tracks simultaneously, equipped with an extensive range of professional audio manipulation features allowing for creative mixing between two independent channels. Any mix created can be saved for legal sharing. ”

Having been involved and hacked on portable music players for a few years by now, I can’t but to wonder exactly who this is targeted for and what they are supposed to do with it? I do like the pictures on their site showing business-style persons using it, but why on earth would any ordinary human want to mix songs while on the go?

The IDG article says (translation by me) that (talking about Jonas Norberg the CEO) “it was in January 2005 when he realized that the computing power required to playback video should suffice to play back two simultaneous audio streams“. Yeah – and that was all we had to know in order to quickly see that this guy certainly is not an engineer… 🙂

Of course, there’s also this possibility than I’m just an old grumpy whiner.

Electronics

Wiimote head tracking and touch stuff

WiimoteI was shown these Johnny Lee youtube videos of his remarkably cool wiimote hacks and I feel an urge to make sure you lot don’t miss out these gems:

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

and

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote

They really make me want one of these to play with. Unfortunately, all the software Johnny’s done for this that is available on his site seems to be C# for Windows! ;-(

Electronics, Rockbox

Sansa V2 and View Roundup

There’s been eager activity in the Rockbox forums lately, and I’ve also had help from friendly guys over at anythingbutipod. But now things are much clearer on the Hardware front of many of the recent SanDisk Sansa players:

Sansa ViewSanDisk has released new or updated mp3 players this autumn, named Sansa View, Sansa e200 v2, Sansa c200 v2, Sansa m200 and Sansa Clip. I’ve summed up the situation on the pages those links take you.

All models except the View use the same main SoC chip now, the AS3525. Funnily, the new m200 isn’t called v2 or anything but it is still totally new hardware compared to the older model called… m200!

There’s no docs available for the AS3525 (yet), and the firmware format for it is still not figured out. There’s lots of work to be done, so we really can use all the help you can offer!

Electronics

MapShare part II – not the last episode

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Tomtom ONEContinued from Tomtom MapShare.

I bought a new shiny 2GB SD card (which btw made me realize how dirt cheap these things are nowadays) and inserted it into my Tomtom ONE only to find out that backups done with the previous version of “Tomtom HOME” (their windows-only PC-based management tool) weren’t recognized, so I had to put back the old SD card again, make a backup, swap back to the new card and restore the backup.

Then I could buy a version 7 Scandinavian map from Tomtom (4o Euros) and yes, the MapShare options are now available and I also enabled the “correction” button for the main screen to allow me to tap it to make corrections as I go. Now I’ll just need to find places to go to where corrections are needed. A bit dissapointing fact is that I’ve selected options to get other people’s corrections even those that aren’t Tomtom-verified (as long as “multiple persons” did the correction), but the tool just says there are no corrections available for me!

Are there really no corrections done? I find that hard to believe, but I’ll give this the benefit of a doubt for a while. Anyone reading this who made a correction on the Tomtom-provided Scandinavian v7 map? I’m curious if the corrections are based on maps or just on positions, since I would guess that their “Western Europe” map will have the same flaws and mistakes as the “Scandinavia” map does…

Electronics, Linux

More Phone Hacking Fun

With Google’s just announced Open Handset Alliance, I figure the chances of getting a phone that’s possible to hack and improve just suddenly increased a lot!Open Handset Alliance

Android is a project by the alliance, claimed to be an open source, Linux-based, platform for core and applications for mobile phones – “a complete mobile phone software stack”. They promise an “early look” of the SDK on November 12, so I figure that can be interesting. The SDK is supposed to be a free download and will contain all the docs. It could potentially mean some fun coming up soon!

It is cool to see both Samsung and Motorola from the handset world joining the band wagon, and also interesting and not the least surprising to see that Sony Ericsson and Nokia aren’t there…

Electronics

WQUXGA really

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LCD monitorI know this is a dear subject for many people but I feel I just have to spell it out after having read this engadget notice about Toshiba’s new 3840 x 2400 22″ LCD screen. They call this a WQUSGA resolution!

Man, can they please stop the silly WQZUXZQGA names for the screen resolutions? I’m a hardcore tech geek myself but I lost track of those weird resolution names a long time ago and I want pure resolution numbers in good old width x height style!

My 1600 x 1200 20″ screen does seem a bit old fashioned in comparison! (and no, I don’t know the name of this resolution either!)

Electronics

My Next Digicam

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Sony DSC-W1 5MP Digital cameraMy trusty old Sony DSC-W1 is several years old by now and it does show when I compare my camera with those of my friends – and especially when I compare the resulting images. I’m pondering on getting a new one, but I’m struggling to find one that matches my criterias:

  1. (Ultra-) Compact. I want to be able to bring it with me easily, in a pocket or similar. Otherwise I end up not taking any photos at all… So it shouldn’t be any bigger than my existing really. I also enjoy and mostly do point-and-shoot style photographing.
  2. 3″ LCD. I got one of the first 2.5″ LCD cameras and I loved how the big screen makes photographing and viewing pics on it more fun. I’ve seen some cameras with >2.5″ screens and I think they look awesome.
  3. Image Stabilizer. Clearly (according to reviews) they can make a difference, especially with zoom or in low light conditions.
  4. Good low-light images (at least comparable to the excellent Fujifilm Finepix F31fd). It seems even the more recent Fujifilms has went downhill in that department, based on reviews I’ve read.
  5. I think I would prefer a camera that accepts SDHC cards so that I can go with 4GB or perhaps even 8GB at once, easily and cheaply.

And what contenders are there really? Lots of them, but I’ve found none that even reaches 4 out of 5 in this list! 🙁

Oh, and note that the number of pixels ain’t terribly important as long as they’re at 6+ something megapixels.

Suggestions anyone?