[ale] Unhalfbricking

[Charles Shapiro]

Very khoul!  Just bought a bunch of new 4-pin headers from ACK this
morning.  I have relatives comin' this weekend, but
maybes I can figure out a way to fit it all in.  And hey, I been
havin' fun with my new soldering iron for a whiles now. I'm mostly
glad you only have to build the level shifter gizmo once and then you
can amortize the effort over a lot of kuro-boxen. In face, I'm gonna
try just substituting the hax04ed daughter board on the other boxes --
then I won't even have to do the simple soldering job to get the
header on there!

Looks like the one I'm working with now does something weird with
/dev/ram1 which keeps it from mounting.  That seems to bollix the
whole init sequence.

-- CHS


On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 6:16 AM, arxaaron <arxaaron at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
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