Slashdot Mirror
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
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.