It’s been more than a year since this tablet pc. I didn’t have much use for it until… Well, I decided that it would go nicely into the car to serve as a GPS navigator and a voicebox using my NetTTS software. And I decided to get a better tablet for everyday usage instead.
So, there go the first bunch of hacks, that solve the issues I’ve encountered.
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Category: hardware
WM8650 tablet guts
As asked by NiTr0
pktcdvd and backups
Some time ago an HDD I had quite a while died. The worst part is, that it contained the backups. It worked for about two years in a fashion where it gets powered once in a while via a mosfet, receives a payload of backups and then goes offline again. Analyzing the corpse it looks like it was the spindel motor. Well done, WD!
This made me thing of another way to store critical backups. Consider me paranoid, but I do not trust cloud services. Then I saw an old cdrw disk wasting its remaining life as a stand for the coffee cup.
Use a POST card from userspace
Okay. This time my small server got screwed up. Totally. segfaults at no apparent reason, lags, and finally the PC not starting at all. Since ssh was down, I had to debug using a UART and a POST card (No monitor in the closet where it stands usually). In the end I had to take the small thing out of its place to the table. A detailed analysis showed up that it was the RAM. Luckily I had a spare 2 GiB chip around and popped it in. However, while troubleshooting it, I hooked the POST card…
The last thing gave me an idea. Not sure if that was done before.
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A cradle for F602
Some time ago I got myself an MT6116 based mobile, called F602. (Yep, I love chineese crap!)
The only thing it lacked was a good cradle, so I took OpenSCAD and… Well, thanks to Dmitry for the 3d printing stuff.
You’ll have to sacrifice your sync cable though. Remove the plug casing, pop in the phone, secure with 2-component glue or thermal glue and you are done.
Obligatory pics:
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Asus N75SF, external subwoofer and alsa
Asus N75SF turned out to be a pretty cool piece of hardware.
However, subwoofer didn’t work out of the box. So time to open up kate and hack the support for it.
The following patch adds a new model: asus-n75sf, set it as a parameter to intel-hda module and you are good to go.
Or in modprobe.d
options hda-intel model=asus-n75sf
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Scam-o-matic
Well, I’ve been scammed. You might have heard of the SD card scam, when you buy a card, and it reports to be bigger, than it actually is, and whatever you write beyond the boundary of the really available space gets lost.
I ordered a bunch of 5 microSD cards, 4GiB each, and they were a pure scam with about 115 MiB instead of 4 GiB.
Luckily, I managed to get my money back, via opening a dispute and later a claim (Scammers didn’t want to give the money back, did they?), but the cards still remained here.
To test such shitty cards there exist 2 tools: h2testw and f3. First for windows, second for linux. Thy figure out the real capacity for you. I didn’t like them, because they took ages to scan one 4 GiB card. And, they operated upon a upon a filesystem, that I didn’t like as well. So I wrote my own tool.
It’s dumb as hell, and was created while f3 was still scanning one card. And it’s a lot faster. Meet ‘scam-o-matic’.
It writes some preudorandom data to the card, until it detects something bad. Usually that happens when we reach the boundary of ‘good’, somewhat ‘reliable’ memory. Then it double-checks the region, and if everything is fine (e.g. no mismatches between first and second pass) it creates a partition table for you, with one partition that covers only working area of the card.
Now just format it, alter the type with cfdisk, and make use of it.
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Configuring a Xilinx FPGA from ARM
Okay, it’s time I got down to my Ph.D project which is a 2D/3D GFX accelerator. I really wonder if I’m going to pull it off. So, after playing for a couple of months with a simulator I decided to move on to an FPGA. I doubt that a spartan will allow me to fit in everything I want – but I definetely can test a plenty of stuff there.
I had this board from starterkit.ru, which has an FPGA and an AT91SAM9260, which is a 200Mhz ARM SoC.
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ASUS wl520-gU: RAM upgrade
I had this router around for quite a long time, but unfortunately it sucked at some points.
1. The clock bug. It’s 200Mhz, not 240, the clock’s off and the result is usb 1.1 hangups. Luckily this is cured by installing a 2.0 hub, to do transaction translation
2. Memory. 16mb is a not enough! Esapecially with the leaking wl driver. b43 seems quite greedy as well. The trunk builds of OpenWRT did not work for me any more, so…
I was of for an upgrade.
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Reverse engineering STC ISP protocol.
Some time ago, I got myself a bunch of those chips. They were dirt chip, they come from china, they have a 8051 architecture and… They are totally missing a way to get programmed in linux.
You can use sdcc, but you are still made to use their binary sh*t to upload the firmware. And they were retarded enoght no to open up the protocol.
So, time to hack…
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