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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."
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
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.
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
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.