Guide to developing with the Stellaris Launchpad on a Linux box

October 29, 2012 By 42 Comments

So you picked up your very own Stellaris Launchpad, a TI ARM dev board which can be in your hands for just five bones. They do distribute several free IDEs which are not size-limited but perhaps you’re more of a text editor and command line sort of person. Well you’re in luck. There’s now a guide to show you how to code for and program the Stellaris Launchpad from a Linux box with using one of the IDEs.

There are two main things that are needed to accomplish this. The first is a cross-compiling toolchain for the ARM architecture; something that has been readily available for quite some time. The second is a way to talk to the in-built Stellaris programmer from a Linux machine. The hardware uses the ICDI protocol, and as we reported last week the lm4tools project can be used for this purpose. The guide also covers building the StellarisWare package. It’s not a requirement, but it makes using the peripherals much easier and provides names for the I/O pins, etc.

Our favorite for debugging microcontroller projects is OpenOCD. From this thread post it looks like there is now ICDI support in the development branch of the software if you don’t mind compiling from source.

Filed Under: ARM, linux hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Rooting a NeoTV set top box from the couch

October 25, 2012 By 12 Comments

The NeoTV is a set top box built by Netgear to compete with the likes of Roku. It streams video from the usual Internet sources like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and YouTube. [Craig] recently cracked his unit open, and in the process discovered that the NeoTV can be rooted using nothing but the remote control.

He starts with a hardware overview. The box houses a single-board ARM design with a 128MB of NAND and 256MB of RAM. The serial port is easy to find, but it does not provide a root shell (which often is one of the easiest ways to root a device). He next turns to poking around the unencrypted firmware update to see what he can learn. That’s how he discovered that the SSID value when connecting to WiFi is fed into a system() command. This glaring security hole lets you run just about anything you want on the device by issuing commands as fake SSID names. It’s just a matter of a little Linux know-how and [Craig] now has root access on his device.

Filed Under: home entertainment hacks, linux hacks, security hacks Tagged With: , ,

How to build your own dedicated Pandora radio

September 20, 2012 By 18 Comments

This mix of modern and retro acts as a standalone Pandora client. It’s certainly a radio upgrade, falling somewhere in between the passive listening of traditional broadcasts, and the complete control of music players that use playlists.

Inside the wooden case a BeagleBoard does most of the work. It’s running Ubuntu 12.04 on which pianobar, a command line interface package for Pandora is running. Those components alone would make a pretty nice listening experience, but since Pandora rolls different music into the mix it’s nice to be able to see what you’re listening to. The four-line LCD is wide enough to display plenty of information. It’s being controlled by a PIC24 microcontroller which also monitors the controls on the top. As you can see in the video after the break, the user interface offers almost everything you could want. It’s easy to switch stations, and you can still register your preferences on each track being played.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: ARM, digital audio hacks, linux hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,

Programming a Propeller on an ARM

September 7, 2012 By 10 Comments

[Stefan] uses a small ARM-powered netbook for his development work, so when he tried to play around with the Parallax Propeller he ran into a few problems. The official tools from Parallax are Windows only, and the available 3rd party dev tools are only compiled for x86. After a lot of futzing about, [Stefan] was able to develop on his ARM netbook and wrote in to tell us how it’s done.

Luckily, Parallax released a GCC port for the Propeller, but unfortunately isn’t completely portable to ARM. The Propeller loader for this architecture ambivalent build uses a little bit of SPIN code, which can only be compiled on Intel machines.

To get around this problem, [Stefan] wrote an installer script to gather all the necessary bits of code to his computer. His ARM/Linux toolchain consists of the Propeller GCC, an open source SPIN compiler, and a Python script used to load code [Stefan] found on the Propeller forums.

Now that [Stefan] has a complete toolchain for programming the Propeller on an ARM device, it’s possible to develop for this very cool multi-core microcontroller on his netbook or even the Raspberry Pi.

Filed Under: ARM, linux hacks Tagged With: , , ,

NAS-based transcoding facilitates security cam viewing on iPhone

August 10, 2012 By 14 Comments

[Zitt] has a security camera which will send him messages any time it detects motion. However annoying this might seem, we’re sure he has his reasons for needing this much immediate feedback. The real problem comes when he goes to view the feed on his iPhone. His solution is to turn the camera’s notifications off, and use his own script to transcode a clip and shoot off an email.

As you can see above, the end result is a concise email that includes the recently captured clip, as well as links to the live feed. He has been storing the clips on an LG N4B2 Network Storage Server (NAS) and since he’s got root access to the Linux system on the device it was an easy starting point for the new system. After he compiled FFmpeg from source (which handles the transcoding) he started work on the script which backs up the recordings and sends the email messages.

One thing he wants to add is a method to clear out the old backup videos. Having encountered a similar issue ourselves we decided to share our one-liner which solves the problem. Find it after the break.

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Filed Under: iphone hacks, linux hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,

node.js for Linux joysticks

August 4, 2012 By 13 Comments

[Tim Caswell] has been using gamepads and joysticks to demonstrate his node.js hacks for a long time. The thing is, he has been relying on C++ bindings to handle the hardware while trying to herald the praises of node.js. Why not cut out the middle man and write a joystick driver in node.js? It turns out to be so simple anyone can do it.

Granted, this is not a kernel driver. He’s relying on the Linux kernel to recognize the hardware and provide him with the customary /dev/js0 file which he can then work with. As you can see in the snippet above, he’s looping through code in order to constantly read from the hardware. To get this far he dug through the documentation for joystick packets (yay for open source!) to find that each is made of a 32-bit timestamp, a 16-bit value, and two 8-bit numbers identifying the event type and button or axis.

Once he has the packets, it’s off to the races. Each data type is parsed into an appropriate variable which you can use in the logic of your own program. Don’t be nervous, this will make a great weekend project!

Filed Under: linux hacks, peripherals hacks Tagged With: , ,

A tale of (un)bricking a $10k Microsoft Surface unit

June 29, 2012 By 20 Comments

We’ve all had that sinking feeling as a piece of hardware stops responding and the nasty thought of “did I just brick this thing?” rockets to the front of our minds. [Florian Echtler] recently experienced this in extremis as his hacking on the University of Munich’s Microsoft Surface 2.0 left it unresponsive. He says this is an 8,000 Euro piece of hardware, which translates to around $10,000! Obviously it was his top priority to get the thing working again.

So what’s the first thing you should do if you get your hands on a piece of hardware like this? Try to run Linux on the thing, of course. And [Florian] managed to make that happen pretty easily (there’s a quick proof-of-concept video after the break). He took a Linux kernel drive written for a different purpose and altered it to interface with the MS Surface. After working out a few error message he packaged it and called to good. Some time later the department called him and asked if his Linux kernel work might have anything to do with the display being dead. Yikes.

He dug into the driver and found that a bug may have caused the firmware on the USB interface chip to be overwritten. The big problem being that they don’t just distribute the image for this chip. So he ended up having to dump what was left from the EEPROM and rebuild the header byte by byte.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: linux hacks, multitouch hacks Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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