[ale] Unhalfbricking

[arxaaron]

> And hey Aaron, I hope you're still holding one or two 'bricked'
> Kuro-pros.  I'll be glad to apply this hack and at least see what is
> going on in there?

Hey, Charles:

Since you've gone through all the trouble of hacking these
Kuro Box things down to the serial connection headers, serial
voltages, baud rate and parity (see below), please feel free to
come and and pick up the 2 bricks I still have here.  If you can
salvage them, they're yours to do with what you will!

And man, I gotta tell you, you've got this years ALE prize for
"Most Tenacious Hacker of Eclectic Gadgets " in the bag!  :-)

peace
aaron




On 2011/03/12, at 11:47 , Charles Shapiro wrote:

> (With Apologies to Fairport Convention )
>
> It is in fact possible to get a console login on a Kuro-Box Pro as
> given away this winter at various ALE functions.
> You merely have to build a Sparkfun RS232 Level Shifter kit (
> http://www.sparkfun.com/products/133 ), solder a 4-pin PCB header onto
> the daughterboard as described in the Kuro-Box wiki (
> http://www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/buffalo/kuroboxpro/serial.html ),
> and connect the shfiter board to the header.  Then you can plug a
> really old computer with serial port into the DB9 side of your level
> shifter.  Communication params are 115200, 8-N-1 .  The reason for the
> level shifter is that the kuro-box is doing serial communications at
> 3.3v, rather than the RS232 standard of 5-12V.  So you need the level
> shifter board to match it up with a PC comm port.  Don't make the
> mistake of misunderstanding the preliminary test instructions on the
> shifter board kit and thinking it's broken; power for the shifter
> comes from the 4-wire side, not the DB9 side.
>
> The console login allows you to log in as root and debug even
> 'bricked' kuroboxen, since you have full 2-way communication.  I am
> currently trying to source more 4-pin male PCB headers; Fry's does not
> seem to have them.  Perhaps ACK Radio can help me out on this?
>
> And hey Aaron, I hope you're still holding one or two 'bricked'
> Kuro-pros.  I'll be glad to apply this hack and at least see what is
> going on in there?  Retail on this thing is, like, $169.  It seems a
> shame to throw 'em out just 'cause the ethernet port isn't getting
> initted. Put a $50 hard drive in one of these and you have a pretty
> dandy little headless linux box.
>
> I've also discovered that the kuro-box actually keeps her static
> ethernet parameters in two different places.  That may be why changing
> it in only one place stops networking.
>
> -- CHS
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo