Our mobile Internet Service Provider (ISP) has a bundle where they provide a 4G modem for internet access, and a separate TV set-top box that can be used to watch their TV content or to watch streaming services. This device was sent to us as part of the bundle, but at Zeus, we don’t really have a use for it: we don’t really watch television in our space. What we do have a need for, however, are low-power computers that can run Linux. In this blog post, we will hack this set-top box to run Linux instead of Android TV.
Just some good ol’ fashioned hackery for the weekend. You’ll need a soldering iron.
And some cash to pay to your ISP when they want the set-top box back whenever you wish to switch to a new ISP.
Still… Cool.
From the second paragraph:
Thom’s “you’ll need a soldering iron” was hyperbole. It’s fully reversible, and besides as the author said, they are confident the company doesn’t want the device back.
They did use a soldering iron though, to connect to the pins out in the open. Anyway, as I said, Cool. I am amazed by many parts of the process, including “These signals look like serial”. I’ve utmost respect for the guys/gals/whoever.
Sorry I should have elaborated: You can accomplish the same thing with a clip on JTAG connector, maybe they didn’t have one though.
And I agree, it’s fantastic work and something I’ve dabbled in over the years (repurposing hardware by sniffing protocols and poking around otherwise) but I’m not great at it.
They were lucky this time.
There were open pins for a serial connector:
The boot process allowed dropping to shell:
And that shell had tools for reading and writing the flash memory.
To be honest, for most cheaper devices this might probably be common. So I am not complaining, this is useful.
One thing to take from the process: always have a TTL->USB Serial cable ready.
Yet another example of why you should hate the block box of ARM over the openness of X86. compare all the soldering and hoop jumping versus just sticking a bootable USB into a slot. Its really sad but such is the nature of ARM, hell I got 2 octocore smartphones rotting in a drawer right now thanks to no updates and no ROMs that support them.
Meanwhile my late fathers netbook from 2011 despite being orders of magnitude slower than the octocores can run a 2023 OS fully patched and still surf the web securely and even play 720p video, just a damn shame ARM turned into a black box, it was a cool idea.
bassbeast,
Yeah, it’s a real shame that ARM evolved this way. I had high hopes but it’s turned out to be a massive disappointment. It could have been a great alternative to x86 for generic open computing, but instead it’s fraught with fragmented proprietary processes and hair pulling.
Obviously it’s not that x86 is architecturally more open than ARM, but more to do with the environment in which x86 became mature with a high degree of standardization in order to support off the shelf software. If x86 were invented today though, it would turn out just as fragmented as ARM, with every vendor pushing it’s own proprietary incompatible boot process and hardware tethered to vendor specific OS images. I don’t see new hardware vendors going back. Interoperability and owner choice isn’t in their interests, especially now that corporations know the value of locking owners into their software ecosystems 🙁
We should count our blessings that x86 remains as open as it is, though this too may change.