[Vincent Deconinck] gave a fresh lease of life to an old and some software smarts. The device in question is an old VOOcorder – a Cisco set-top box provided by VOO, his cable service provider in Belgium.

The VOOcorder doesn’t have any WiFi hardware or browser / app based interfaces. It’s a simple device controlled either via an IR remote or front panel buttons. [Vincent] added an ESP8266 and hooked it up to the IR receiver on the set-top box. He also set it up as an SPI slave to the front panel VFD display controller and connected it to the debug serial interface of the VOOcorder as well. The software, on the other hand, required a lot more work consisting of code running on the ESP itself, several HTML pages and JavaScript code for the browser front end, and a few scripts running in the background. The result was bidirectional interactivity from within a browser, allowing him to send commands and receive status information as well as providing a user-friendly search interface. Further, his browser interface was integrated with information from the service providers website letting him do scheduling and recording of programs.

The stuff that interested us is how he sniffed out the IR signals, figured out the SPI protocol used by the front panel controller, and implemented SPI-slave mode for the ESP8266. [Vincent] was surprised that such a cheap device could handle three distinct web servers while parsing two message streams without a hitch. It’s a great hack showing us how to use super cheap electronics to upgrade and modernize old hardware.

Check out the two videos after the break – showing a demo of the hack in action, and a walk through of the hardware modifications. Posted in, Tagged,,,,,,. While on the hunt for some hardware that would let him stream video throughout his LAN [danman] got a tip to try the €69 Tronsmart Pavo M9 (which he points out is a re-branded Zidoo X9). With some handy Linux terminal work and a few key pieces of software [danman] was able to get this going. The Android box was able to record video from the HDMI input with pre-installed software found in the main menu as [danman]. File format options are available in the record menu, however none of them were suitable for streaming the video (which was the goal, remember?).

Aug 16, 2009. Mining audience data from STB devices that deliver TV content via cable or satellite is turning into the digital equivalent of the Alaska gold rush. If those companies can crack the code, they may soon produce TV audience data using samples that dwarf Nielsen's current 18,000 national people meter. Real Lives 2010 Serial Number Registration Key.

[danman] was able to poke around the system easily since these boxes come factory rooted (or at least the Tronsmart variant that [danman] uses in his demo did). Can anyone with a Zidoo X9 verify access to the root directory? Long story short, [danman] was able to get the stream working over the network. Although he did have to make some changes to the stream command he was issuing over ssh. He finds the fix in the ffmpeg documentation which saves you the trouble of reading through it but you’ll have to check out his blog post for that (pro tip: he links to a sweet little.apk reverse engineering tool as well). We’ve seen before, however, streaming and recording HDMI at this price is a rare find.

If you’ve been hacking up the same tree let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to! Posted in, Tagged,. [Lee] wrote in to tell us about a Set Top Box he hacked. Before the cable industry lawyers get out their flaming swords he’s not stealing cable, or really doing much of anything. This is a hack just for the adventure and thrill of making someone else’s hardware design do your bidding without any kind of instructions. He posted about the adventure in two parts. The first is and identifying the pins.

Arduino to the rescue! No really, and this is the type of Arduino use we love. Using the board becomes a quick tool for probing and identifying JTAG connections. The image above shows a different piece of hardware.

Datalogic Skorpio X3 Driver Windows 7 here. From looking at it we’re pretty sure this is which is specifically designed for JTAG debugging with ARM processors. This is the beginning of the second part of his documentation which (or instructions) using OpenOCD and GDB. I Came To Play The Science Of Rhythm Guitar Players. It’s a chore to follow all that [Lee] discovered just to write his name to the display of the box. But we certainly found it interesting.

The display has a convoluted addressing scheme. We assume that there are cascading shift registers driving the segments and that’s why it behaves the way it does. Take a look for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments.