[BasilFX] wanted to shoehorn custom firmware onto his IKEA Trådfri light bulb. The product consists of a GU10-size light bulb with a LED driver as well as IKEA’s custom ZigBee module controlling it all. A diffuser, enclosure shell, and Edison-screw base give the whole thing the same form factor as a standard A-series bulb. The Trådfri module, which ties together IKEA’s home automation products, consists of an ARM Cortex M4 MCU with integrated 2.4Ghz radio and 256 Kb of flash — not bad for 7 euros!
Coincidentally, [BasilFX] had just contributed EFM32 support to RIOT-OS (“the friendly OS for IoT”) so he was already halfway there. He used a JTAG/SWD-compatible debugger to flash the chip on the light bulb while the chip was still attached.
[BasilFX] admits the whole project is a proof of concept with no real use yet, though he has turned his eye toward getting the radio to work, with a goal of creating a network of light bulbs. You can find more info on his code repository.
We ran a post on Trådfri hacking earlier this year, as well as one on the reverse-engineering process used to suss out the bulb’s secrets.
256 Kb, how much is that in fahrenheit bits?
It’s about 1.1 Fb ;)
Linux?
Not on Cortex-M series: no MMU
I can’t quickly find it, but, I am pretty sure HaD highlighted an 8bit arduino running linux. It took many minutes if not an hour(?) to boot, but, I doubt the AT series chips have MMUs either. :)
No MMU does not mean no Linux.
There’s mainline support for cortex m3 and several other no-mmu uarchs.
What is the thing with videos? Can’t people write (and read) anymore? I mean, if it is written one can read at our own pace, do searches, all goodies of digital media. Video? Not so much. Between this and the hackaday.io sites that contain no useful information, this site is going down the drain.
Amen. I definitely prefer a write up.
https://github.com/basilfx/TRADFRI-Hacking
You click on the videos? If they can’t type it I just skip it. Text is easy to archive as valuable future reference, but vids a space hog with little useful content beyond a “lookee what I did! I R intelligunt!”. Things that wiggle and talk I’m sure catch the typical lazy masses, but to use it and duplicate it I need hard numbers and actual detail that vids just can’t include without showing a vid of the typed page or consuming masses of space.
I so agree with you on the stupidity of video for such information. Watch half an hour for what you can read in five seconds… Worse, since Google owns Youtube, if you want to find informtion, you have to skip tons of videos before you get to the text sites…
Paai
Byron the fugitive sentient light bulb would dread a wireless network of light bulbs as “he” would have to go even farther off the grid to escape certain doom!
This seems like a nice, inexpensive dev board. I wonder if it only supports Zigbee or if you can run BLE on it as well. The microcontroller seems to have support for it, but I’m unsure of the hardware (I’m really bad at this radio stuff).