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| 0 users currently in Hardware / Software. |
| User | Post |
| Sukasa Posts: 1107/2068 |
What I just said
Also, for puttin gthe chip hack in... just put the chip down on the PCB, pins against their contacts, and heat them. the contacts have the sodler already on them, so it shoudl work fine. if not, you ned to sodler each pin down, and then just scrape off the excess oslder with the iron. |
| HyperHacker Posts: 2514/5072 |
Originally posted by Sukasa + Might be worth a try, but I have pretty shaky hands. Plus I'd have to put it back in.  Also, the pins don't poke through the other side of the board; they're stuck to the board itself. What's the proper way to remove those? I've never managed to. |
| drjayphd Posts: 752/1170 |
Once you figure this out, I'm comandeering your services to figure out what one can do with a WebTV. Again, not to get free service. |
| Sukasa Posts: 1094/2068 |
if you have a soldering iron, and you're very careful, you can.
I've removed cihps like that before, all I did was sparpen my soldering iron's tip with sandpaper, and gently heat and lift the pins of the PCB, one by one. |
| HyperHacker Posts: 2495/5072 |
The pins are like 0.4mm and there's no way I could remove the chip from the board. |
| FreeDOS + Posts: 620/1312 |
Make a ROM burner and flash it by force  |
| HyperHacker Posts: 2489/5072 |
Yeah, IDing the chips isn't too hard, it's how to talk to the existing firmware to upload my own code that I need to figure out. |
| FreeDOS + Posts: 618/1312 |
You'll have to find out what kind of microchips are in the box, and hope you can find any assembly documents on it/them. That's probably the biggest challenge you'll have. |
| HyperHacker Posts: 2481/5072 |
Somehow I've come into posession of a Motorola DCT-2000 digital cable box. I got it a few months ago and tried plugging it in, even though I don't have any cable service (I have satellite). It worked, sort of... I could display the channel guide when the power was off (not on  ), but it just said "no data" or some crap and would crash if I entered certain menus. It was the same program my box used back when I did have digital cable. One odd thing I noticed was I could enter really long channel numbers; there didn't seem to be any limit to their length, but if I went on for a few minutes it started printing garbage. Also it was stuck on channel 65535.
Anyway I recently came across a tool I could use to remove the security screws (a file  ) and open the box. I thought it might be fun to re-program it to do something weird like play Pong or what have you. I think I found the flash ROM chip the firmware is stored on (haven't looked up the chip ID), so if I could rig up some sort of connection to that, I could flash whatever I want onto it, but I figure there must be a better way.
I noticed a button on the mainboard and decided to hook it up again to see what that would do. (Turns out it's just a reset button.  ) This time it doesn't show the channel guide, just a blank screen, but I can enter a diagnostics screen using a well-documented button sequence (Google it). Kinda fun to poke around in, but useless really. The display shows "E 11" when off, and "0" when on... I can enter numbers on the remote, and they show up on the display, but nothing happens. "E 11" apparently means "invalid unit code", which makes sense since the diagnostics screen says the unit code is 000-00000 etc etc.
Anyway this thing has a serial port, what seems to be a sort of parallel port, a place where you could connect an IR transmitter, another port you could plug some sort of modem into, all manner of digital and analog video/audio in/out ports, and of course a remote control. I'm sure I could find some use for most of these. I should point out that I don't want to hack it to get free TV, unlock channels, etc... like I said I don't even have cable, I have satellite and I rarely watch it anyway. I want to just dump all the TV-related firmware and put something else on it (not sure what yet). So... does anyone know of any way to communicate with this thing to upload new firmware? Like I said it has a serial port, plus there's various connectors and/or jumpers on the mainboard whose purpose I don't know. Right now it's just looking for a cable signal, but I doubt I could build an entire cable modem to interface with it that way.
[edit] What I thought was the flash ROM was actually an audio decoder.  The ROM is an M28W160CB, but the pins are waaaaay too small for me to just wire something up to it.  |
