[Lee] wrote in to tell us about a Set Top Box he hacked. Before the cable industry lawyers get out their flaming swords… he’s not stealing cable, or really doing much of anything. This is a hack just for the adventure and thrill of making someone else’s hardware design do your bidding without any kind of instructions.
He posted about the adventure in two parts. The first is finding the JTAG header and identifying the pins. Arduino to the rescue! No really, and this is the type of Arduino use we love. Using a package called JTAGenum the board becomes a quick tool for probing and identifying JTAG connections.
The image above shows a different piece of hardware. From looking at it we’re pretty sure this is a Bus Blaster which is specifically designed for JTAG debugging with ARM processors. This is the beginning of the second part of his documentation which involves code dumping and stepping through lines code (or instructions) using OpenOCD and GDB. It’s a chore to follow all that [Lee] discovered just to write his name to the display of the box. But we certainly found it interesting. The display has a convoluted addressing scheme. We assume that there are cascading shift registers driving the segments and that’s why it behaves the way it does. Take a look for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments.
Can we program the set top box to send those annoying pop-up ads that crop up after each commercial at the bottom of the screen to the back of the program screen?
Can we stop using the term Set Top Box! This is the age of hang on the wall flat screens.
Console! Just like games. Cable TV Console.
Good hack, but if the on-screen graphics can’t be changed and the “look” be dammed it’s not enough.
brings back memories, I helped design that box back in the day. Hack away please
Wow :) that’s brilliant – I’d be really interested to know more. If you recall any of the details (and don’t mind some questions) drop me an email – address is in the header on my site.
I think I have the source code and CRC generator for that box sitting around somewhere…
Any extra information would be great :) email address is on the header across the top of my site if you think you might know anything that might be of interest.
Wow, Lee, ya hit the jackpot :) Kudos and keep on tinkering :)
“Before the cable industry lawyers get out their flaming swords… he’s not stealing cable”
probably an older technology box that does not work on their cable service so he cant steal cable since the box is outdated.
maybe someone in foreign 3rd world country could use this to steal cable since they probably get all the technology that is useless to us.
for example red, green and blue boxable payphones and phone switches are probably in some 3rd world countries but not in the united states
do you realize YOU are the third world country when it comes to cable technology?
rest of the civilized world enjoys Docsis 3.0 with 250Mbit internet (and no data caps)
haha, that gave me a good chuckle….because….its…truuuueeee. How pathetic is that?
his whole blog
http://www.sodnpoo.com/?n=all
is a goldmine of cool hacks, almost every third post is HAD worthy
Well this is awkward. ESET detects JN.Trojan Downloader on that URL.
Could you check please?
no, because I dont use IE so I dont care ;)
I suspect it’s tripping up over some of the non-executable javascript code in this post: http://www.sodnpoo.com/posts.xml/driveby_malware_analysis.xml