4play
01-30-2005, 03:06 AM
this has to be the most clever hack i have ever seen. this fella wanted to grab the rom off his ipod so they could write a bootloader to run linux. so he found a rather unique way of doing it.
the hack (http://ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo/) this link is pretty much slashdotted so mirror (http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/ad23102e0ff21b4555a743333dd1d8bb/index.html)
In case you wondering what the hell it all means
piezo - think small quartz crystal you get remote control cars and radios.
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
the hack (http://ipodlinux.org/stories/piezo/) this link is pretty much slashdotted so mirror (http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/ad23102e0ff21b4555a743333dd1d8bb/index.html)
In case you wondering what the hell it all means
piezo - think small quartz crystal you get remote control cars and radios.
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