Category Archives: Electronics

Consumer electronics, portables, whatever

Electronics

Tomtom MapShare

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Tomtom ONEI have one of these lovely little Tomtom ONE GPSes, and the other day my brother notified me about their cool recent update to their firmware!

Now they feature map correction abilities, and apparently your map corrections and added details such as points of interests etc can be shared with your friends!

Very cool (sounding). This turned out to be a little easier said than done (as usual). First, I had to boot my computer into in Windows and run the “Tomtom HOME” software. It turned out to crash repeatedly after about 20-30 seconds of use, but after a lot of restarts it managed to upgrade both the GPS unit and get a fresh new “HOME” software version. With the new HOME software it stopped crashing and funnily enough the new version immediately downloaded yet another new HOME upgrade…

Anyway, now I have the latest firmware and I try out the menu option for map correction only to see… that it claims my maps are too old to use this feature! OK, I have the “Scandinavian” version and using the Tomtom HOME it says I already have the latest version… I assume this means that I should rather buy another map set or similar. It claiming I have the latest is suspicious anyway since I know my brother have newer maps. After some checking, I learned that he bought newer maps a while ago. Ok, time to get updated maps. In fact, they don’t even sell “Scandinavian” maps these days so I guess my map route was a dead end, now the closest thing is “Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland” which is almost twice as much data – and thus such an upgrade requires me to get a larger SD card first! 😉

I’ll get back when I’ve got a new card and a new map!

As many times before, one can’t but to wonder what my parents or similarly (not at all) tech-skilled persons would do if they would face this kind of challenge…

Electronics

Chinese Cool-looking Fake iPhone

I’m quite impressed by what these Chinese cloners can produce.

As can be seen on this youtube video, there’s a nice typo on the boot-up screen (“tPhone”) and it does use the Windows startup sound(!), but it is an otherwise pretty decent-looking clone.

As for someone who’s never seen a real iPhone, just seeing them on shabby youtube videos certainly gives the impression that this fake is pretty similar to the original one. Even functionality wise. Apparently this one even supports MMS and works with any SIM card…

Now, it’s less than two weeks till I’ll go to China… 🙂

Electronics, Rockbox

Zunes, New Zunes and Hacking it

Microsoft (New) Zune Microsoft hasn’t given in yet it seems, as they announced their updated Zunes yesterday. They’re available as 4 or 8GB flash and a 80GB hdd version, and these ones are claimed to play more movie formats (like h.264 and MPEG-4) and they actually seem to be capable of using the wifi for things like syncing music etc.

The zune music is also said to go DRM-free… All in all, I’d say they seem to really make an effort to be a serious iPod alternative.

Anyway, there hasn’t of course been any serious dissect of these new Zunes yet but given how their earlier models were made it seems unlikely that they will attract any larger crowds of eager hackers. They also seem to have applied a fair amount of cryptography, another Apple-like approach, so it is hard to put a replacement firmware on it.

The guys in the Zune Linux project have really no clues about what hacking these things require, and their early chatter on deciding what logo to use and what “distro” to base their work on have just been hilarious jokes. I don’t expect this new set of models to change this situation in any significant way.

I’m not aware of any known skilled (Rockbox) hacker having a go at Zune. The old Zune models are however quite similar (but not identical) hardware wise to the Toshiba Gigabeat S models, for which there is a Rockbox port in the works (as I’ve mentioned before).

Electronics, Open Source

Hack Everything!

Being an ordinary hacker person in an industrial country such as Sweden, I own lots of random technical devices that I either have and use in my home or carry around for my use and enjoyment. Most, if not all, of these provide a fair amount of features and bugs. Many of them are controlled by an internal microcontroller.

My dect phone, my gsm phone, my DVB-T boxes, my TVs, my music players, the “entertainment system” of my car, my DVD-players, my wifi-router, my printer, my digital camera, my GPS, my video camera and the likes.

lcddisplay.jpg

I seriously wish I had the docs and the source code for all of these, and thus the ability to change them to behave more like I want them to. I don’t believe I’m alone either. I wouldn’t even have to do most of these changes myself, we would have communities built up around basically all of these devices so that people from all over would share their ideas and code to improve your device. I would hack them all, if I could.

Of course, some of these devices aren’t at all possible to upgrade since they’re produced and sold without that ability and for those I’d have to accept this (and buy a different model the next time around), but a lot of these things can be reprogrammed at will already if we only knew how.

If only the manufacturers didn’t hate us.

Electronics, Licensing

Ainol License Violation

Ainol V2000 is one of them Chinese portable media players we see pop up every now and then in a never-ending series – most of them never really reach the western markets.Ainol V2000

For this particular player the firmware is available, and by simply inspecting the contents of that we can see that it is packed with open source and free software, but nowhere is the source for this package to be found… (not all of these packages are GPL licensed of course)

GEMDOS, Mplayer (various parts), unzip by Gilles Vollant, MAME, Snes9x, FLAC, wxMusik, VisualBoyAdvance, SDL, FFmpeg, Avifile…

The image also seems to contain code from Real and possibly also from Microsoft (based on a guess on the file name strings)…

And if you want to dig around more, here’s the 5.2 MB firmware file available for download. It seems Ainol’s official web site doesn’t even mention this V2000 model?

(Marcoen brought most of this to my attention.)

Electronics, Rockbox

Rockbox on Sansa View?

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Sansa ViewOk, since we have Rockbox on Sansa e200 and e200R working and the support for the c200 series in the pipe, I feel it is about time to make a statement about the possibilities to get Rockbox for the new Sansa View player: it is (most probably) a totally different beast hardware-wise, so it will require a new port with all the associated hard work.

And no, SanDisk has not been in touch with us any further, so I would say it is highly unlikely they will donate any players or similar to us this time.

Once we get to see a detailed dissection with nice hires pictures we can tell for sure, but their talk about 30fps H.264 video in 320×240 resolution implies a major change.

As a summary, the View is indeed SanDisk’s iPod Nano killer with double the flash size for the same amount of money, with a microsdhc-port, claimed longer battery life and only slightly thicker.

A funny detail: SanDisk previously did another player called Sansa View that they put on hold just before the summer!

Electronics, Rockbox

Dissecting iPod Touch

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iPod TouchiFixit ripped apart an iPod touch.

Unfortunately these guys continue to just publish lores camera images instead of hires scans, but this pic shows the (Samsung) chip with the Apple logo on it.

Apparently this has a Wolfson codec while the new iPod Classics use a Cirrus chip!

The touch and the iphone seems to have a lot in common internally. Not too surprising really…

The touch is a whopping 120 grams beast, while I thought the SanDisk Sansa e200 players were heavy with their 75 grams…

Electronics

UFS in all devices!

Micro SDApparently a lot of electronics companies, including Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Micron Technology, Spansion, MTMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments are planning to introduce yet another memory card due to release 2009. This time they call it “a common flash memory card format” (UFS – Universal Flash Storage) – which is kind of amusing in my view. Aren’t all memory cards “common” in one sense?M2 card

JEDEC published a PDF press release about it, saying amongst other things:

“The UFS specification is expected to accommodate greater efficiency in the design of memory cards for card manufacturers and end-product designers. The standardized interface will also reduce the system design burden for embedded applications.

The next-generation flash memory specification is expected to be completed in the first half of 2009, with a draft specification available in the first half of 2008.”

Anyway, decreasing the vast amount of various different formats could be good for end-users. Perhaps. We’ll see…

Electronics, Rockbox

Picture Rockbox on a Camera

Canon Powershot A550Obviously the CHDK guys have working code for Canon‘s (and other’s) Digic II powered cameras, and reading their wiki they use plain arm-elf for the job and… yeah so does Rockbox and… yeah, well it certainly at least opens a possibility for a Rockbox branch for these toys!

Of course there would be porting involved and I don’t know how these cameras have on the audio front, but those are all just details…