Piezo-Acoustic iPod Hack 397
jugander writes "nilss over at the iPodLinux Project (previously on /.) has performed one of the coolest and most bizzare hacks I've seen in a while. He was able to extract the bootloader from the 4G iPod by sounding out ticks with the iPod's squeaky piezo. With some tweaking and a makeshift recording studio, he was able to dump the 64 kb file at 5 bytes/sec. And yes, this means that 4G iPods can now boot linux!"
Yup (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yup (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yup (Score:2)
Re:Yup (Score:5, Interesting)
And even more related, you could do the same thing with the sound registers, except that you could get a hardware buffer instead of interpreting the sounds.
~X~
Re:looking forward to an iPod emulator (Score:3, Informative)
Unlike a GBA emulator, for example, there's no content for an iPod emulator to play that you can't already just play in your native desktop OS.
Re:looking forward to an iPod emulator (Score:5, Funny)
2 posts and it's... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:2 posts and it's... (Score:2, Funny)
Wonder if they were hosting the website through a iPod through Apache, might explain the reason for such a short time overload.
Coral Cache link to article (Score:3, Informative)
Its sweet but does it ahve a point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Its sweet but does it ahve a point? (Score:2, Funny)
No iPod have been bricked, it's dual boot (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't see it now, but the iPod linunx site states clearly that, to their knowledge, no one has bricked an iPod due to installing iPodLinux on it -- even since the long-ago development days.
In fact, iPodLinux's installer sets it up so you can dual boot into Linux and the Apple firmware, and you can make one the default. I installed this on my 1G and the other day, and it indeed works very, very easily. It is one of the more underrated hacks going on today, IMO.
Its sweet but does it ahve a point?
To satisfy your slashdotty interests: imagine you and a friend have iPods, and imagine you connect them with a firewire cable. You both boot into linux, transfer files, and reboot (back in to the Apple firmware). The use is left as an exercise to the hacker.
Re:Its sweet but does it ahve a point? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm waiting for someone to get an electric toothbrush to run Linux. Then he'll get WiFi working with it and modulate the pulses so that his skull resonates at the right frequencies to hear it for the purposes of streaming Ogg files directly into his brain.
Why would someone do it? Well, because no one else has and to get linked on Slashdot.
LK
why do you people only care about linux (Score:5, Funny)
Re:why do you people only care about linux (Score:5, Funny)
Now please wash your potty-mouth out with soap, detergent or caustic soda.
Wow, this hack is soooo cool.... (Score:5, Funny)
You are so confused (Score:3, Funny)
Yes it is, Bunky. It's the other end that is not pointless.
The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usefull (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2, Funny)
oh.. wait a sec.. isnt my... crap.
P.S. The ipods, at least the 4G's have TWO cpus.
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:4, Insightful)
Tetris
viP (text editing)
In the pipeline:
Doom
GameBoy Emulator
If you have any problems with the apple firmware, linux-on-ipod is the place for fixing that.
Also, another aim is to encourage people to look into their 'closed platforms'.
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:3, Insightful)
Text Editor - WORSE than cellphone keypad text entry.
DOOM - Ya, like that's gonna go. The iPod occasionally gets choppy sliding levels of the menu.
Gameboy Emulator - One button + scrollwheel does not a GB emu make. Also, go scrounge up an original Gameboy for $10 at a flea market or something.
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2)
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2)
Besides, having Tetris on your iPod when it's all you've got isn't the worst thing in the world. I usually carry just my cell phone around even though I've got a GBA etc. Okay, my cell phone isn't going to replace my GBA or a PDA with 802.11, but if I don't carry those with me anyway, my cell phone is > 0
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:5, Insightful)
We know the ipod CPU power and abilities (in the 4G ones and up) is might higher then what apple is using it for. I would love to see an alternative music/playlist browser, as the one they have sucks when you have thousands of songs that all have different artists, albums, etc. All my songs are in mp3 (sorry ogg) so I'm not really concerned about playback of other formats. I know the ipod linux team has a long way to go, but you think with so many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of ipods, at least a few people would be interested in hacking it to do more then what apple wants.
Look at the TI calculators. They might be intended for mathematics functions but people have written thouands of programs that do a ton of different things. Some are pretty stupid, true, but some do some helpfully tasks. And if you bought the hardware, why should you not use it to its fullest extent?
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2)
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2)
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2)
It works the reverse too. You can have it automatically rename files based on id3 tags. And unlike iTunes method of doing this, you can actually pick the folder/filename layout instead of their crappy unchangeable default. It's a sweet app.
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2)
Could the profit margins on iPods be WAY higher than we're lead to believe?
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:2)
Jeez, you're not a geek!
Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about hacking.
It's like when an artist draws something on a napkin. Creative energy expands in every direction.
piezo? (Score:5, Interesting)
Short for piezoelectricity or piezoelectric effect. Piezoelectricity is an electric charge that occurs in some substances when they are squeezed or otherwise subjected to mechanical stress. It is also possible to cause these materials to vibrate when a voltage is applied to them. Quartz is one of the better known piezoelectric materials, and is commonly fabricated into small pieces, called "crystals" that are used for frequency standards. A crystal of specific size and shape will vibrate at a predictable and very stable rate when a voltage is applied. This makes them ideal for use in things like watches or clocks for digital audio equipment. Piezoelectric elements have also been used various types of transducers such as phonograph cartridges, microphones and loudspeakers. Piezo microphones can be quite small and still have relatively high output at a low cost; however, their less than ideal frequency response prohibits use in critical applications. Piezo loudspeakers usually come in the form of tweeters, or very high frequency elements. They generally have very low distortion in the 5 kHz and above range, but haven't widely been used in sound reinforcement due in part to their relatively low output levels. It takes dozens of the average piezo tweeter to equal the output of one medium-sized compression driver
I'm still confused (and I did RTFA) how the bits of the bootloader were translated to sound. Anyone care to explain?
Re:piezo? (Score:2)
Or is that not the part you didnt understand?
Re:piezo? (Score:2)
Re:piezo? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:piezo? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:piezo? (Score:5, Informative)
His goal: extract the data from the ROM.
His problem: he didn't know very much about the hardware. Sending the data through the FireWire port was not an option, since he had no idea how to access that port.
His opportunity: someone showed him how to make the piezo make sounds.
So, he picked one sound to represent a 1 bit, and picked a different sound (more of a click) to represent a 0 bit. Then he wrote code to read data from the ROM, and bit by bit, look at each bit and play the appropriate sound. He recorded the sound. It took hours to dump the whole ROM this way.
Then it was a matter of sampling the recording with a desktop computer, and writing code to detect the two different sounds, turn them into data bits, and save the data bits on disk.
steveha
Re:piezo? (Score:2)
Re:piezo? (Score:2)
That beeing said..what you said is eactly what I would have done.
Re:piezo? (Score:2)
Re:piezo? (Score:2)
ya, that's the part I understand. How does one specifically play the bootloader thru the piezo, though. I'm not an iPod owner, but I'm pretty sure there is no option to play the bootloader
Google Cache (Score:5, Informative)
The Sound of iPod
I got an iPod for christmas. The ipodlinux project was one of the main reasons for my choice and so I started exploring the iPod as far as I was able to. I patched the bootloader and got some basic code to run but there was no way to access any hardware other than the two CPUs yet. To get the LCD, Clickwheel and the harddisk working we needed to reverse engineer the bootloader in the flashrom. But to do that we first had to find a way to get that code. Seems quite impossible without any knowlegde about the IO-Hardware but I found a solution...
The whole idea started last week when leachbj gave me a piece of code that caused the piezo in the iPod to make some *squeek*-sound. I played around with that code, changed some values and somehow was able to produce different sounds. Just for fun I came up with the idea of using this different sounds for transferring data. Some minutes later I dropped the idea because I thought that just won't work and I won't be able to write a decoder for that. Two days later I woke up and somehow just tried encoding a 32bit value into different beeps. It worked so made a loop around it to dump about 4kb of memory.
The problem with that idea was that I could only transfer 8bit/s. Anyway, I tried writing a decoder and it seemed to work. Well, it didn't really work but it decoded about the first 256 bits correctly. The decoder was some Perlscript that loaded the whole audio into RAM and used about 1GB RAM for a 20MB audio file. It worked ok with some tweaking but still the RAM usage was way to high because if I wanted to dump the whole 64kb I would have an 1200MB audio file or something.
Some ideas came to my mind after thinking about the problems I had. The first one was to use compression so the transfer won't take too long. It would have taken about 45hours with the code we had. With compression maybe only 22h. To solve the memory problem I decided to rewrite the decoder in C that only reads about 96bytes chunks of audio data and then decodes that. Davidc_ helped me with that.
This was the first time I thought I this could really work. Again I played with the piezo code and figured out, how the piezo really works. I was able to produce some more unique beeps. Later I made the beep for 0 (the last bleep you can see in the picture) much shorter so it sounded more like a click. I even managed to make the first bleep shorter so I got about 5byte/s.
When we thought we got the encoder in the iPod with zlib and the decoder working, I decided to try recording the whole dump at night. So I put the iPod in the "iPod Recording Studio" and went to sleep. The iPod is just a cardboard box in which Samsung send me my laptop back. It has foam in it so I thought it would be ideal for recording the bleeping of the iPod. (Move your mouse over the picture.)
The next day I woke up quite early. The first thing I did was looking at the recording. I heard the iPod stopped bleeping so I thought everything went fine. In fact nothing worked at all. I recorded 8 hours full of zeros. Furthermore, the iPod's battery became empty though it was plugged into the USB port of my laptop the firmware wasn't loaded so it didn't request power over USB. So what you can see in the picture is the harddrive spinning down, then the iPod goes off for some minutes and then reboots. The harddriver was spinning during the whole recording session because there was no way to turn it off.
After this I was really disappointed and I dropped the project for the rest of the day but in the evening I tried again with a better decoder. It worked quite well but we weren't able to decompress the file. I concluded that was caused by the malloc() hack and zlib would allocate the same memory twice or something like that. Anyway, I haven't had much sleep that weekend so I was tired and just went to bed and thought about dropping the whole
Clever hack (Score:3, Interesting)
Sweetness !
Re:Clever hack (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, if you donate an ipod to me, I'll even make it play music
Does this mean? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does this mean? (Score:2)
Re:Does this mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does this mean? (Score:3, Informative)
I looked up the spec sheets to double-check my info (and realized I was wrong.) Here they are in case anyone else wants to check them out:
PP5002 for 1-3 Gen iPods:
PP5002 [portalplayer.com]
PP5020 for 4+ Gen iPods:
PP5020 [portalplayer.com]
Re:Does this mean? (Score:3, Informative)
Vorbis gives you better quality for the same number of bits, or a smaller file for similar quality. Partly this is because it's just newer technology and does some stuff better, but it's also because it's a little more complicated. While
Wow, just wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple / NASA / (et all) had any sense at all, they'd be beating down this guy's door to hire him into a think-tank.
Re:Wow, just wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
Clever, sure. But remember this is how 300 baud modems work, too. This is also how fluke multimeters are tested in the factory. They have no IO, so they chirp data back to a tester.
What is clever to one person is old hat to many others.
Now This, THIS is why (Score:5, Insightful)
All in favor?
Mod me down.
Yeah it's pointless.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares if it's not that useful, it's lateral thinking for you...
Re:Yeah it's pointless.. (Score:2, Informative)
Hehee. Just like loading off a Cassette tape :) (Score:5, Interesting)
Data transmission via acoustics is certainly nothing new, but getting something OUT thats not meant to be exposed on a MODERN device this way is just too cool.
Right now there are MANY P'o'd execs at Apple, and a bunch of engineers going crap (but quietly thinking man is this cool)
I wonder how many other things this can be applied to , for reverse engineering of bootloaders, roms, etc.
I would have fried a dozen gamecubes 2 years ago trying this method had I been given the idea then, (Yeah I know all the goofy bootloader stuff NOW in the last 6 months ) for GC is out,
KUDOS, now I might actually buy one.
Re:Hehee. Just like loading off a Cassette tape :) (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know of any software or hardware engineer who would give a damn if one of their users coaxed something out of their product that they were told to try to hide. Most engineers understand the futility of trying to prevent users from accessing their code or data. I've never heard an engineer introduce the idea of encrypting their own data or code--the idea always comes from the bean counters or management.
Re:Hehee. Just like loading off a Cassette tape :) (Score:2)
Why ? the beancounters and deadweight,,,, uhh managment for the most part have no clue what really make things tick. Now Jobs or the like are probably thee ones who would get it , and may be kind enough to run interference for the engineers...yeah right...
IN the end the bean counters will blame the engineers out loud, but not do anything about it because down de
Re:Hehee. Just like loading off a Cassette tape :) (Score:3, Interesting)
I've a feeling Jobs has been running interference for The Rest of Us for quite a long time now. He's playing the record industry, stockholders, and the movie industry in a carefully planned game that will break the way we used to do a lot of things. He'
Re:Hehee. Just like loading off a Cassette tape :) (Score:3, Interesting)
And then there was playing the 1812 on the chain printer... but that's a different story ;)
Re:Hehee. Just like loading off a Cassette tape :) (Score:2)
Fascinating stuff, really.
Re:Hehee. Just like loading off a Cassette tape :) (Score:5, Funny)
I did something like this.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically I made a program that analyzes(FFT-ish) whatever comes in through the mic.
The sent data was beeps at 375Hz(zero) and 1500Hz(one). I was able to recieve data from a range of ~5m at around 50bps. In real-time no less.
As an added bonus it annoyed the hell out of my roommates(beepbeepboopboopbeep..)
Re:I did something like this.. (Score:2)
Or you could really go for it, and use a well known modem algorighm. People can do 56k modems in software - but you need to have an A to D resolution of more than one bit!
If using piezo, you might want to concentrate around 3khz or so for best response.
using this hack for ages (Score:5, Funny)
blindPod? (Score:3, Interesting)
Clever, but necessary? Does iPod Linux not give HW access for sending data over the iPod Firewire? If he can strobe the speaker, can't he strobe the headphone jack, for better fidelity and bandwidth? I understand the esthetics of this goofy, clever hack - worth doing even if just for the sake of weirdness. But was it necessary?
Re:blindPod? (Score:3, Informative)
Now that he has dumped the firmware, he knows where most of the other hardware is mapped.
Obligatory comment (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, umm....
Oh!
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these things!
OK, mod me -1 redundant, but... (Score:2)
I for one (Score:2, Funny)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/
and I for one welcome our new iPod overlords.
go work for google (Score:4, Funny)
for Schlock Mercenary fans... (Score:2)
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20020616.html [schlockmercenary.com]
With some tweaking indeed. (Score:2)
Something I'd like to see... (Score:2, Interesting)
It would be cool if the iPod/Linux software could incorporate such functionality, along with some
213 Minutes? (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137702&cid=11 5 15142 [slashdot.org]
On a serious note, that was an admirable (and true) hack. Although there were several potential routes to extract the bootloader (FireWire, iPod's normal file transfer mechanism, analog data out the headphone jack), he took the path of lea
Kudos for the old school.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bizarre! HURMMPH! (Score:3, Interesting)
Done something similar (Score:5, Interesting)
It was funny to do all this when computers were not as equipped as they are today. Now we're just users and nothing more.
iPod shuffle (Score:3, Funny)
I guess they'll have to use the LED lights to blink the signal out. Hell, they'll probably have to use the LEDs to blink the interface out too.
Re:Hackaday, meet your new delayed mirror, Slashdo (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, he extracted the bootloader using the piezo! It's bloody brilliant.
I'm even looking forward to the dupes of this article which will probably be posted as soon as his server recovers!
Re:Hackaday, meet your new delayed mirror, Slashdo (Score:2)
It works out well- if
It's complex ecology, but it works. Slashdot it always behind, and I hope it stays that way. Otherwise
Pot to Kettle (Score:3, Insightful)
O, bollocks - we could all do 'better' things with our time. Including stopping posting on this infernal website. You could have donated the time you spent reading this
Some people have fun doing things like this. Sounds useless to me as well, I'll grant, but I'm sure a lot of stuff that we all do seems useless/stupid to others. Like watching Star Trek re-runs.
Re:why!? (Score:2)
Pack your bags, we're going on a guilt trip! (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck You.
He doesn't work for you.
If you care about those things, get off your lazy ass and do something about it yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you. Don't expect any of us to give a rat's ass about your agenda when we're working for free, on our own time.
But of course, I doubt you're one tenth as capable, or creative, as this guy is.
Re:Pack your bags, we're going on a guilt trip! (Score:2)
i agree! (Score:3, Informative)
don't pick on someone that has a hobby that exercises their mind. go after all the people wasting their brains.... or the ones that take financial aid to go to college just to drink and fuck off for 4 years and end up doing some worthless job s
Why not? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Troll (Score:2)
Re:why!? (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, do you have any hobbies? If so, you're wasting valuable time you could be using on cancer research you frickin clown.
Re:why!? (Score:2, Funny)
Only because you are too stupid to realise that iPods running Linux cure Aids and cancer (but only in Penguins).
Re:Slashdotted already? Anyway... (Score:2)
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:9dT24A15Kf0J
I think that mistake deserves negative mod points
Re:Slashdotted already? Anyway... (Score:2)
Re:Yes But, (Score:5, Funny)
Only if you've been reduced to making nothing but clicking noises.
Re:Yes But, (Score:2)
Re:Yes But, (Score:2)
Re:Valid URL? (Score:3, Funny)
But I bought my kidney very hush-hush from the back of a gray van [snopes.com].
Re:Valid URL? (Score:2)
Re:More ideas for an ipod (Score:2)
Re:More ideas for an ipod (Score:2)
I'd imagine that no one wants to impoverish the tape in
Re:DMCA? (Score:2)