January 2021
Reverse Engineering fun for just 9.33 € + shipping
This article is a brief introduction to the reverse engineering of a Bluetooth LE Temperature and Humidity sensor and data logger. This is done, according to the EU reverse engineering law, only for interoperability purposes. The device is called SensorBlue or ThermoBeacon or ORIA on Aliexpress and here is a photo of what you get: You can download an Android application to get you started and test the device. Next we will see some tools useful to inspect a Bluetooth device.
3 minutes
January 2012
Android on OpenRD This is the first article about porting Android 4.0.x AKA Ice Cream Sandwich AKA ICS on the OpenRD Client. This is a pretty powerful ARM machine (1.2 Ghz 256 KB L2 cache, 512 MB RAM and Gigabit Ethernet) with a PCIe Xgi graphics chip. The goal is having a good hacking machine, so the system will be brought up via NFS root (perhaps in a future part everything will be put on the internal NAND or a SD card, it should not be difficult). Prerequisites The standard U-boot provided with the OpenRD is used to boot the system. The environment of the boot-loader has to be set-up to start mainline kernel, as outlined on the Debian on the OpenRD page. The Android kernel and users-pace will be loaded via the network (the IP and paths refer to my development environment): setenv bootargs 'console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/nfs ip=10.0.10.187:10.0.10.57:10.0.10.57:255.255.255.0:openrd:eth0:off nfsroot=10.0.10.253:/mnt/fat/armroots/icsrd,tcp,nolock init=/init rw' tftpboot 0x00800000 openrd-android ; bootm 0x00800000 The Linux Kernel After some research for a Linux kernel with appropriate Androidism I choose to start with the kernel published by Freescale on their Open Source git repository. I had good results with their kernel on i.MX28 and i.MX53 based machines. The patch for the OpenRD are based on the imx_2.6.38_android branch, tag imx-android-r12. ICS is based on Linux 3.0 kernel but I haven’t seen big problems using this version (just some warning about missing some IP connection tracking statistics in the sysfs file-system). You can download my latest patch for supporting the OpenRD board and the .config file I used. This patch:
Adroid Android Linux Embedded Marvell Kirkwood OpenRD
6 minutes