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Hacking Acer's Set-Top Box
Buell Smelt writes: "I found this site about these set top boxes out there, and it seems kind of cool, now that I'm bored with my iopener... http://www.phoenixgarage.net/ Seems like a bigger challenge than the iopener in some ways, but maybe not. I just like the fact that it has NTSC/PAL out, so I can use it as a home MP3 player in my livingroom and don't have to haul a monitor out there. It also has the same form factor as most home stereos. It's a lot less expensive than the iopener, that's a plus. There are some floating around in the 'Internet Appliance' area of eBay. I guess you can also turn an old VGA monitor into a TV with these things. That's kind of handy too."
Yeah - this is what I have looked into - but I am really interested in doing the same stuff as the current Liberate software - that is, a small OS, with a small (but highly functional) internet browser. I figure you could possibly set up an LRP type system, then throw Lynx on it - but I would like to see something more graphical. I am sure it can be done (one promising source that I found was a distro called TVLinux - I have a link on the site).
It's too bad these boxes couldn't be used as a router/firewall of some type - you can only put in one NIC. But they can be used like they were designed - I am just wondering why there isn't more embeddable Linux stuff (TVLinux is the one promising thing - but they ask sooo much for the distribution - but if they can do, others can too).
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Plus I'm lazy. The All-in wonder would really only be usefull to Windows boxen (especially with all the cool software.)
Oh... And the patent's pending ;)
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
Well, there is a table silk-screened on the motherboard that seems to indicated bus speed settings in some way, but there aren't any jumpers. You should be able to see this table on the scan of the main PCB, near the processor (I believe).
Heck - I just took a good look and realized that the tables don't turn out at all - going to have to fix that. Basically, there are a few tables silk-screened on the board. One indicates some settings that seem to be related to bus speed settings (like a jumper setting table), but there aren't any jumpers near the processor to mod. It is either some kind of settings that are done with solder jumping, or in a special hidden area in the BIOS...
Supposedly, though (I haven't tried this yet myself - Chris Healy has), it plays MP3s well, just like it is, without overclocking. Maybe it is the MP3 files he is using - I had built an MP3 player for my truck, using an AMD 586/133, and I had to OC it as well to get it to play MP3s nicely.
Maybe this machine is architected slightly differently to alleviate the issue?
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I am the owner of the site - no, I have nothing to do with the Ebay listing. I wouldn't stoop so low to do the kind of thing you are suggesting.
The wording may look similar, but I assure everybody that I don't have ANYTHING to do with the Ebay auction...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
You can fit quite a bit of linux into the 4 meg flash, if you can get linux to handle the flash. cramfs is perfect for this sort of thing.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the TiVo. The 133mhz Elan in this box beats the tar out of the cpu in a TiVo - a PowerPC 403 at 50mhz - way slower than anything ever put in a macintosh. IBM puts them on RAID controllers. they are Low End ppc. Embedded class. Wimps.
The major reason the tivo works so well is because of all the dedicated hardware in it. With a tweaked kernel, a hardware mpeg encoder, and a hardware mpeg decoder, there's no reason this box couldn't do something similar - but without a couple of open PCI slots and a considerable development effort i don't see it happening.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
How do you do this? Do you have links on where I could find out more about this? It might not be an ideal use, but it would be an interesting use...
Thanks...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If you want to do it for the challenge, knock yourself out.
When I bought this box, I was on the Webplayer coop list - I thought getting one of those would be fun. But after purchasing this box, and seeing nobody doing anything on it - I decided not to get a webplayer (and they recently had a problem with paypal - so maybe it was for the better), and look into what this box can do.
Yeah, it's cheesy - you can't put it in the bathroom easily. But that isn't what it was designed for! It was designed to go with your TV. To act as a smart terminal for a backend server, dishing out a funky version of html (that has, for example, tags to control the TV window size and position, in addition to others) - to bring about a form of interactive TV.
Basically, what would happen is the user of the box would turn on the box, and his cable service. The program that was on would have special data in the VBI of the video (same area as closed captioning), that would cause the box to go to one of the servers and get one of these special HTML documents. The HTML would cause the custom browser to "frame" or overlay the video with the web page information, that could be navigated as the program progressed. The video program could control the box, and the user could control the box as well. So, it was a two way interaction.
You don't need much power for that.
This box has the power of around a p75. Think outside the box, here - a P75 is a lot for this type of thing.
I remember when a p75 was a high-end machine (and a good 486 was over $1000)! Come on, people...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
From what I understand (and I haven't had a chance to verify it yet), if you boot it with it plugged into a TV only, it will activate the TV, otherwise only the monitor is activated only.
Also, when using the monitor, yes - you can view TV signals (so yeah, I guess this would be a way of using your monitor as a TV)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If I had a warehouse in which to hold such a thing, and didn't have to pay shipping, it might be feasible to have such a Cray. My Alpha 433 box is probably more powerful, mind you.
It's pretty valid to be a bit schizophrenic about it: On the one hand, that Cray may have cost $10M to build way back when, and it's a shame to waste that; on the other hand, if I can get a machine that's more powerful for $5K today, then I'd stupid to offer more than $5K for the Cray, unless I felt some special sentimentality.
I feel no sentimentality for some Acer set top boxes, so I'm certainly not inclined to overvalue them.
In contrast, I feel a little sentimental towards my Digital Multia; the case engineering is so nice that I keep it around even though it doesn't work anymore. It probably cost $5K to build, and people have literally been giving them away of late.
There's some sort of balance between economic rationality and sentimentality; it's easy to bash it by heading to one extreme or another. Of course, we're talking about Acer set top boxes here, so I doubt sentimentality enters in heavily...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
This is my site.
One could say it is old hardware. But the fact is that they were manufactured in 1998, but they haven't really been deployed. You wouldn't believe the tight grip the companies involved have on this thing, with regard to specifications and settings. There are still several jumpers on the main PCB that no one knows what they do, or what thier purpose is.
Acer won't tell me anything - only to say that such information would be "very expensive" for an individual.
Liberate wasn't forthcoming at all.
Neither of these companies would tell me, or sell me, squat. All of the information obtained has come from other sources and my own experimentation.
Actually, it is almost understandable - you see, I wasn't supposed to have gotten one of those boxes through "outside" channels. I got mine off of Ebay (for much less than $100 - the $100 figure is based on ideas me and my contact have been throwing around). From what I understand, they aren't available from the guy I bought mine from anymore (he sold his last one a while back - at least, that is what he told me).
Could you build a Tivo with one of these? No, unlikely. But think about what can be done...
Sure, it is only a souped up 486, but it can play MP3s. Chris Healy has done this, and he has also gotten Nintendo and Sega emulators running on it as well. This thing is meant to use an embedded OS - a small, fast, and preferably real-time OS. Think small applications - things that don't tax the CPU. The "built in" browser software is actually pretty powerful - if you could get one of these boxes with the OS and browser on it, your could set up a WebTV type box for doing any number of things - set up a "proxy server" to browse through on another box, and supply the funky HTML it uses (detailed on the Liberate site), and you could do some pretty cool X-10 control stuff (I can think of a way to do an X-10 wireless camera control system, with the video in the corner, and the controls arranged around it). Or, you could set it up to be a "WebTV" type system for others, using any ISP you want.
That is just with the built in software - put in your own OS and software, and you can do almost anything. The point is not to think of this thing as a general purpose PC type system...
What has me excited about it, is the fact that supposedly Acer distributed over 50,000 of these boxes. So where are they? Why haven't they been deployed? Are they just waiting for the right time? If not, will they just be put in a landfill? Will they flood on the surplus market in the near future?
AOLTV uses a similar product, but it is more powerful, and not made by Acer (I am not even sure if it is PC compatible in any way). I think these set-top boxes are going to be a big thing, in the near future. Maybe I will be wrong - but a lot of time, money and energy has been put in place by a lot of major players recently (and almost quietly, I might add).
So - think small. Think of the device as a front-end device, not a do-it-all box. Think ASP like applications - what can be done?
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The product looks nice. But the web site is definitely high bandwidth with all that Flash. And I noticed at least one MS proprietary character in the FAQ, which looks ugly on some systems.
Since I actually own one of these things and have been able to get linux to run on it. I thought I'd share some of my insights on this.
Basically, the units are shipped in many different configs. In fact many times it's custom to the buyer. Typical config is a 150Mhz Intel Clone (usually cyrix) proccessor and about 4-8 megs of RAM. There is also some flash RAM for the OS/Liberate stuff.
The reason there are a lot of these boxes out on the market is the lack of RAM. The liberate software stores a lot of information on a central server that would normally be stored locally (such as cookies). This made the browser very slow on high load systems.
Also, because of the limited RAM, there really isn't anywhere to go with the box. It's never going to play real video or the ilk. Almost everything is SMT on the mainboard. You COULD upgrade the memory if you had the correct tools. People have done this their palms and tivo's. Although at some point I'd question just buying a normal PC.
The video chipset is an older Trident type. You could probally get the box to use the Video Features under 95 assuming you could still find the drivers, but none of the video overlay is supported in Linux right now, and the chipset was really only used in a few notebook computers and the NT 150. I doubt anyone is working on this.
The modem is an ISA slot. You can use a NE2000 nic is this slot just fine. Some of the older linksys cards actually line up rather well.
Some of the NT 150's had built in smart card reader/writters. It's not clear from the picture if the model has the hardware. This is really what the box would be most useful for. Assuming someone could scratch together a linux driver for the smartcard device you could use it to clone smartcards.
In general the Liberate stuff can be removed if they have the liberate flashing utilities. The ISP generally had some utilities to configure the hardware type. Usually to config if the box had a modem, DSL, or ethernet. You should be abel to erase it with those.
In general it's an okay set top box, but the lack of support for the video chipset and lack of memory does present a barrier to being a good linux box.
I hear ya. Why, the other day I just threw away a gold-plated Cray. Not much I could do with, being old hardware and all. I'm just about to throw out my Beowolf cluster too.
When will all these loser learn that to be a 1337 h4x0r you must waste and throw away a lot of expensive hardware. Sheesh, I bet they're working on wearable computing right now, dorks.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I remember when a 4mhz Z80 with 64K of RAM was a high-end machine. Mine was fancy. I added a real-time clock to it! Woohoo!
I do see your point about the non-standard use of the box. What gets me is the people who want to make it into a general purpose computer. What good is a P75 with 8MB of RAM as a PC? Add $100 for a hard drive and all of your time and you've got more into it than you can buy a used P166 desktop machine for.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Unfortunately, interesting kit like this is somewhat harder to come by over here in the UK - the tivo has only just been commercially released, and many of the cool hackable gadgets don't even make it out. It's a real shame, as there are a lot of us over here who would like a chance to have a play, but the cost/inconvenience of getting them shipped over makes it prohibitively expensive :(
For less than $100, you can buy a little box that converts VGA output to something your TV understands. They are usually used for presentations (PowerPoint), but work fine for general usage, games, etc. as well.
I'm wondering, if they can put a hard drive in it, and they can get it to run linux. CAn't they put the tivo software on it since the software is open source? Sure you'd still have to pay tivo some dough or just use it as a digital recorder that only works if you know the exact time you want to record....but still...Perhaps a modified tivo software that gives better functionallity?
It seems to me that with the increased availablity of gadgets that want to dial home to connect to a proprietary service, there is a need for a project to spoof modem connections and reverse engineer protocols. I see these things all the time and think, nice piece of hardware but I don't want to be shackled to their service. Take for example these new digital picture frames. They look like something that has a lot of hacking potential but how do you get them to talk to your own machine instead of calling home. Is it possible to attach two modems together using some sort of crossover cable? Is anyone working on reverse engineering some of the protocols used by these devices? I know may of these companies are selling the hardware at a loss in the hope that they will make money on the subscription, too bad for them.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Shoehorning a running Linux system into a 4 meg flash ram is certainly not pedestrian. We haven't done it yet - but perhaps someday we will. Then, of course, you have to get some kind of application and networking going...
It doesn't make a bad MP3 player at all - and it makes a decent platform of Sega Genesis and Nintendo emus.
It doesn't have a floppy (well, actually it does, in a way - read the FAQ on what info I have on it), but you can hook up an IDE hard drive easily enough - and there is the 4 meg of flash (once you can get access to it, that is).
No, you won't be able to build a Tivo - but that wasn't the reason for this device - it was meant to supply interactive TV. Think ASP-type applications - that is where the power of this box is...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Actually, you wouldn't believe how much this box has been opened and fiddled with since I got it - no problems yet. This machine is actually a pretty solid box.
Don't worry about actually buying one of these from Acer - it is unlikely you will even be able to get them to admit that they make them. It took me over a month to get an answer from Acer Taiwan that basically said "get your support elsewhere".
I would imagine that unless you waved a ton of money in their face, and ordered several thousand of the boxes, you wouldn't get anywhere...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have an SBC using the same IDE chipset and it's worth nothing that the IDE Chipset they use in this Acer Set-top box (the ALi M1487/M1489) DOES NOT, in fact, support DMA (or at least it doesn't support it correctly). This will cause a huge hit in system performance, especially under Win9x.
For those of you who don't know that the absence of DMA capabilities means, it means that the CPU has to do a lot of the work to access the IDE drives so while the Drives are being accessed the system is essentially halted for that timeslice. I think the newer Linux Kernels have some kind of workaround for it, but I'm not sure.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Anyone tried this with one of those countertop Compaq Ipaq flatpanel things? They're only $199 if you "promise" to buy service for it, and they look pretty cool. They run WinCE, so I assume they are StrongArm based.
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My time has value and I bill based on the number of hours I work. If I am going to spend my limited time on a project, it's either because the end result will be worth the effort or because I will enjoy what I am doing. Hacking an outdated 133mhz set-top box satisfies neither criteria. I could spend the same time doing billable consulting work and use that money to buy a complete, current generation Athlon system.
The flip side of it is that this is pretty old hardware. I would not pay $100 for one of these units; if it's an AMD K5-133, as seems to be the case, this is basically like a Pentium 75 with 8MB of RAM and no disk.
It's not going to make a great MP3 player; it's certainly not going to provide the CPU horsepower needed to build "something like TiVO."
The iOpener represents more "modern" hardware; ditto for the ThinkNIC. I've actually thrown away newer hardware than this, and I'm hardly near to having 1GHz Athlon boxes going to waste...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I just interviewed with this company - got to see their prototype MP3 / DVD / Web Portal boxes. They were sweet. It runs linux, has a hard drive, broadband ready (aka ethernet port), built in DVD player. It was purty.
Amen! I did the i-Opener thing and now have one in the downstairs bathroom. Now I can take an e-Dump!
But the i-Opener had some important features lacking in the Acer device. It had an LCD flat screen. The CPU ran at 200mhz (vs 133 in the Acer). It had 32MB of RAM vs. 8MB in the Acer and could be expanded with industry-standard SODIMMs.
The Acer seems like a waste of time to me. It's slow, lacks RAM, requires a TV or monitor for output, can't support DMA hard disk transfers (according to another /.er), and has very limited expansion capabilities.
If you want to do it for the challenge, knock yourself out. If you want a computer, put one together at today's dirt-cheap prices and have something truly worthwhile.
One guy I have talked with who is supposed to be getting one of these boxes lives in Argentina - and he says the PAL standard there is different from the European standard. I haven't been able to find anything that says whether the PAL standard on the box will work in Argentina. Does anyone have any experience with this?
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I came across this product last year when I ripped apart a laptop to see if I could figure out a use for the LCD.
I guess this proves there is a market for choosing a unique name. All I remembered was "cheese". Enter "cheese vga" into Google, and voila!