Wednesday 23 May 2007

JTAG

I've wanted to get the JTAG pinouts for the Reciva Barracuda board for a long time. That way it should be possible to resurrect bricked radios without having to desolder the flash and add an XD card socket.

Since the Samsung processor is a BGA package, the only way to be sure of the connections seemed to be removing the chip and buzzing out the pads with a multimeter. I mentioned this to a friend at work, he said he'd like to have a look at the board. 2 minutes later he arrived back and the board looked like this (thanks Robin!):


After work I got busy with the multimeter and datasheet. The results seem to be as shown below - I've marked up one of the diagrams from the Sharpfin project:


I've got a JTAG cable, but haven't had chance to try anything yet.

Tuesday 1 May 2007

Remote Control

I had a quick look for anything interesting in the kernel sources Reciva have on their site and noticed lirc_barracuda.c. LIRC is the well known Linux Infrared Remote Control software. Some Reciva based radios have a remote control so I though it'd be interesting to see if I could add one to the Logik IR100. All the software is already installed so it should just be a case of adding a bit of hardware, connecting it to the right pin on the Barracuda board then tweaking the appropriate configuration file.

A glance at lirc_barracuda.c showed that the radio expects incoming IR signals on GPIO pin GPG6. This is present on the long connector of the Barracuda board.

Here's the hardware I'm currently using (based on an IR reciever for the NSLU2 "Slug" here modified slightly, it uses an SFH5110-38):



It seems to work fine and provides additional buttons such as Alarm, Sleep and Media. I did have to cross compile irrecord to create the configuration file for my remote.