[Barry] needed some way to get serial output to help debug his efforts to port Linux to the HTC TytnII (Windows mobile Pocket PC phone). He wrote some code to send serial output via one of the LEDs on the phone and rigged up an AVR to pic up the output and provide a USB interface to the computer. It runs at about 200bps – perfect for the quick debug session.
http://www.hackaday.com/2008/05/27/porting-chdk-to-new-cameras/
Yep, this method was on HAD a little while ago.
Posted at 1:56 pm on Jun 28th, 2008 by Wolf
Camera flash != cell phone IR-LED
Neat trick, though he probably could have done it easier over the headphone jack — HTC uses a special 11-pin port that looks kind of like mini-B USB, but has additional pins for a headset. I would think it would be easy to find a software modem package, though maybe it’s not trivial to route the system terminal to it.
Posted at 10:00 am on Jun 30th, 2008 by James
Thanks for the kind words!
@wolf yes, been done a few times, but as far as I could tell never quite like this.
@james You assume we have audio :)
Also you are right, (assuming we had audio) routing to the headphone port after decoding the incoming console data would be a nasty job. I decided to do it this way as it was very simple to do, 9 lines of code in the Linux kernel and a chunk in an avr.
Posted at 1:09 pm on Jul 1st, 2008 by Barry Carter
Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web and a special How-To hack each week.
Powered by WordPress
Cool topic, I think I saw this done to a camera once to dump its firmware via a LED reading USB device. Think it was one of the new cannon’s…
Posted at 10:32 am on Jun 28th, 2008 by BlizzardDemon