Saturday 28 February 2015

Reflashing an Intel Galileo

If you're the lucky owner of an Intel Galileo board then you'll probably know that the device has an 8MByte flash chip, which contains the BIOS and a Linux boot image (even the ones that MS shipped apparently). Sadly, it is possible to accidentally trash the contents of flash chip rendering the device unbootable. The good news is that it is possible to recover the device if you have hardware that talks SPI. That could be a BusPirate, a BusBlaster, a PICKit2 (Linux only) or one of the many FT2232 SPI or JTAG boards. 

Tuesday 17 February 2015

New Sunluxy DVR

A while ago I picked up a cheapo Sunluxy DVR but quickly discovered that it had a couple of nasty security issues. The device actually worked reasonably well as a DVR so I was keen to try and patch the issues by modifying the OS. Sunluxy didn't offer any firmware updates so modifying an existing update wasn't an option.

Cutting a long story short, I basically ended up breaking the device by manually writing to (apparently the wrong bit of) flash. U-boot is available so there is still a chance to recover the situation if I can find the correct flash image.