Dane Elec So Smart Firmware Upgrade
I recently bought gadget at walmart called the Dane-Elec Media Streamer that I had been eyeing for some time. It is a small battery powerd portable wifi streaming device about the size of my tp-link mr3020. After playing around with it I feel that it has potential but the android for it is in beta (i think) and leaves alot to be desired. My first complaint is that the only supported format for upload is photos and it has to be from the camera app, you can't even upload a picture from the gallery, and only one at a time. So I did some searching to see if the device has any support from the hacker community, but there is none as far as I can tell.
So I did some more searching and I found that the device looks to be a clone of device made by Gigastone called the Smartbox. Now the Smartbox also has an but it looks like it has more features. I already tried the smartbox app to see if it works with the media streamer but it doesn't.
Some how I stumbled upon page and found lots of info about the device. Internally, the box runs Linux on a Qualcomm Atheros AR9331 (pdf) processor, a Gigastone rep informed us.
This part no longer appears to be supported by Qualcomm as one of its 12 XSPAN AR9xxx processors. The AR9331 offers a single MIPS 24k core clocked at 400MHz, and is typically paired with the WiFi-oriented Linux.
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The device also has 128MB DDR RAM and 32MB SPI flash, says Gigastone. So I can't tell if it runs openwrt or not but if it does then maybe it can be hacked to add ftp server support by adding some packages. My goal would be to add an ftp server feature and just use to manage uploading files to the device from my phone. That way I could do batch uploads/downloads and still stream off the device. I already tried to see if I could connect to it using es file explorer but I can't.
So any ideas? Posts: 3 Joined: January 23rd, 2014, 7:47 pm.
I didn't like how the internet bridge light lit when not bridged (seemed odd). Even with latest versions of software same thing. So modifying the /var/www/netledset.sh file. Look for the following lines: Code: if '$STA' = 'on' ; then INTERNETLED=$((INTERNETLED.4+1)) else INTERNETLED=$((INTERNETLED.4)) fi and change to Code: if '$STA' = 'on' ; then INTERNETLED=$((INTERNETLED.4)) else INTERNETLED=$((INTERNETLED.4+1)) fi Of course this isn't permanent and rebooting the media streamer will wipe this out.
So I wanted it to be permanent. Well, I wasn't too careful and bricked it.but was able to bring it back.
More details on a next post. This required connecting to the serial console which required popping open the case which was no easy task. I basically used a knife and cut along the seam around the top until i was able to get under the lid and pry the rest off. No permanent damage, yay!
Once I had it open I had to remove the 4 screws (2 silver and 2 black) and pull the main pcb off of the lid. On the top of the pcb is the CPU and described in a previous post. The hope was that there would be test points (TP) on the pcb that I could tap into for serial communication. After studying the CPU pinouts I found there are UART points for serial communication.
One note the serial console is TTL and not RS232. Google to see the difference. I had a TTL UART cable for Raspberry Pi and thought I'd give it a test run. I connected up the TX and RX to the test points and found a combination that gave me data when powering up the media streamer but the text was all garbled. After thinking about it for a bit I realized that I'd not connected up a ground.
Once that was connected at 115200 the console connection was working. (TestPoints.jpg) So with a little solder magic I was able to connect up a couple of wires for the console UART port (TestPointsConnected.jpg). I made the mistake of not securing the solder points and accidentally broke off TP3. I was able to get a solder point back on the line and hot glued it right away to secure. Attachments I was a bit anxious to do some work and didn't hot glue the solder points for support and accidentally broke TP3 of the PCB. A little trace back on the TP3 line and I was able to reconnect the wire.
I hot glued before I even tested to make sure it was working again. BrokenTP3.jpg (156.88 KiB) Viewed 24613 times This image shows the wires soldered onto the PCB at TP2, TP3 and a GND point. This image shows where to solder the RX, TX and GND points for the TTL UART for serial communication with the CPU.
Posts: 5 Joined: March 26th, 2014, 10:38 am. Here is a breakdown of the flash: Code: # cat /proc/mtd dev: size erasesize name mtd0: 0000000 'u-boot' mtd1: 0000000 'u-boot-env' mtd2: 0000000 'CONF' mtd3: 0000000 'NVRAM' mtd4: 0010000 'uImage' mtd5: 0040000 'rootfs' mtd6: 0020000 'secfs' mtd7: 0000000 'ART' When I bricked it what I'd done was decided to make the internet bridge LED more useable (only light up when it has an internet connection as the default was just the opposite). To do this I needed to write it to flash somehow to make it more permanent. I stumbled upon the flashcp app on the device, part of busybox: Code: # flashcp BusyBox v1.22.0.git (2014-03-27 16:22:49 CST) multi-call binary. Usage: flashcp -v FILE MTDDEVICE Copy an image to MTD device -v Verbose Hmm, should be able to write specific parts of the flash partitions.
Binwalk broke down the firmware update files for me and I was able to pull out the secfs part (/dev/mtd6) which I found (can't remember how) had the /tmp/www portion of the file system on it. Binwalk automatically gunzipped the file and so after peeling this out of the firmware I was able to untar it out and modify the netledset.sh file. Knowing that the file was tar/gzipped I decided to do that in one step Code: tar -zcvf www.tar.gz www That command tarred and gzipped the www directory right into the www.tar.gz file. I then ftp'd it to the media streamer and was ready to flash it to the mtd6 partition in flash.
Code: flashcp -v www.tar.gz /dev/mtd6 and off it went. After a reboot though the device didn't come back up.not cool! This prompted the console port work.
Dane Elec So Smart Firmware Upgrade 2017
Well, once I got console I found that the file I'd saved to flash was corrupted or at least the expanding process on bootup was not successful. Now that I had console access I had more room to play.
I first challenge was getting wireless access back to it. After loading parts of the httpd.sh file to get drivers loaded, messing with an old dd-wrt router and working with iwconfig I was able to get simple access enough to ftp in.
Whew, that part was done. Now to figure out what happened with the flash file. After a little trial and error I found that I could not tar and gzip the file all in the same process. Perhaps the version of tar I was using was broken. Anyway I separated the steps; Code: tar -cvf www.tar www and then Code: gzip www.tar and ended up with a file that I was successfully able to flash to the device and boot with my preferred modifications. Posts: 5 Joined: March 26th, 2014, 10:38 am.