Openschemes

Schemes you're a part of

By openschemes, on January 3rd, 2010%

7,443 views

Happy New Year, hackers!

Something that we’ve been putting off for some time is nice pics of our teardown of a no-name “MP5″ player. We’ve been putting it off because, embarrassingly enough, the device arrived in a fake PSP box and is in all respects a terrible PSP knockoff. Oh, except it can’t play PSP games, only NES games. knockoff fail!
We certainly don’t support the dodgy Shenzhen practice of applying any big name label to any small-time device, and we apologize in advance if anyone thinks we are supporting PSP knockoffs. We are not! To prove it, we will tear the fraudulent case right off this bad boy in a matter of minutes.

The device is not a bad gaming/media toy on it’s own, I really don’t know what the vendor is thinking he will gain by labelling it PSP and MP5. I mean, what the hell is an MP5 anyway? The marketing departments in these Chinese companies really have to get it together.

Ugh - lame knockoff on the outside

Fig 1 – Picture of the front of the shameful knockoff case

Back of the knockoff

Fig 2 – The back of the victim

But for what it’s worth it’s a pretty good device.

4.3″ 16:9 TFT LCD which looks pretty nice.
Digital camera that can take both crappy pictures and crappy video – meh from us, but some folks like that stuff.
Video out, and rumors of video in with a little hacking are starting to get our blood pumping.
2, 4, or 8GB NAND flash depending on what chips are populated on the board (or what you add yourself!).
Socket for an external microSD/TransFlash card for gobs of extra storage,
A fairly killer SPMP8000A ARM cpu.

The device is designed to play pirated NES, N64, Gameboy/GBC, Sega/Megadrive, and perhaps some MAME stuff – I’m not sure. In addition to this, it also plays pirated MP3 audio and MP4 video but it must be pirated I think or it will not play. In fact, it should be marked FPBP – for pirates, by pirates – because this thing is a DMCA nightmare from top to bottom.

Well we’re here to help these poor misguided souls repurpose their device into something useful. There’s already a growing homebrew scene on the older generation SPMP3xxx series devices, so we intend to spearhead the same sorts of development on the SPMP8xxx series devices!

The teardown is as simple as can be – two tiny philips screws each on the top and bottom and the metal shell comes away from the back of the device. You’ll need to be a bit careful in freeing the device from the front casing as the LCD is probably pretty delicate. By bending outwards the plastic sides of the device you can liberate the PCB assembly from the confines of the USB and headphone ports on top, and the SD and LCD clips on the bottom. Continue on for hi-res pics of the naked PCB… Tantalizing, I know!

Continued on Next Page… Or Jump to Page 2

By openschemes, on January 3rd, 2010%

Cheap TOP2005 EEPROM Programmer. It Sucks – Or Does it?

By openschemes, on October 23rd, 2009%

6,183 views

We had originally intended for this article to be a scathing review of the TOP2005 programmer, one of chose cheap USB EEPROM programmers that are coming out of China these days. We bought one a while back and it was fine for standard 27C64 eproms and the like, but totally sucked when trying to read anything modern like a PIC or newer electrically erasable devices. So into the file cabinet it went to collect dust.

Picture of TOP2005 Programmer

Fig 1 – TOP2005 Programmer

However, when we ripped the beast apart we liked what we saw. It’s a bit of a hack to an old parallel programmer we think, but the hardware looks good. A USB to parallel adapter talks to an 8051-clone microcontroller. The micro talks to a Xilinx CPLD and a Xilinx FPGA that run the pin buffers. The programmer attempts to implement a good bit of eeprom programmer fanciness such as identifying logic devices, reading manufacturers, etc. Plus, it’s portable and USB powered and oh so cheap and hackable. We REALLY wanted it to work, but it just acted like a piece of junk.

We probed the pins, snooped the USB, and disassembled the software. It’s rather cool in that when changing devices, it uploads a new bitstream to the FPGA. So in theory, this guy should be infinitely extensible if you were inclined to write new bitstreams to the FPGA and do some custom software work.

Opportunities like that bring to mind images of relaxing by the fireplace on a snowy winter’s day… While the TOP feverishly spews attacks to some micro or something, quietly blinking and churning out data. Since the programmer can supply power from 2.7v to 20v and can drive 40 pins (all with an unprotected micro and Xilinx’s), this thing could be a pretty awesome programmable test bench.

However, it couldn’t even read an ATtiny!?! We had to find out what was the problem.

Continued on Next Page…

By openschemes, on October 23rd, 2009%

Our next victim – preparing to hack the Protek D620

By openschemes, on September 16th, 2009%

2,199 views

Here’s our next victim – a datalogging meter made by protek.

It seems fairly capable but the software could certainly use a little tweaking and a few more features would be nice.
Sounds like a fun little job for our resident hackers here at Openschemes!
Looking inside, we see that it uses an NEC uPD780058 micro with 60k internal flash – yum!

And Protek was kind enough to build us a nice serial interface – oh this is going to be too easy! Well keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned for the next installment of the Protek . . . → Read More: Our next victim – preparing to hack the Protek D620

By openschemes, on September 16th, 2009%

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Hacking no-name “MP5″ players with SPMP8000A – Part I, teardown

Cheap TOP2005 EEPROM Programmer. It Sucks – Or Does it?

Our next victim – preparing to hack the Protek D620