Electribe reverse engineering
A gitrepo which represents people's attempts to document our research of the inner workings of the electribe emx/esx. All the firmware files are here for anyone to play with.
Everything is in the Wiki
All gathered information is stored in the Wiki, the repo itself serves a storage of data- and researchfiles mentioned in the wiki.
Questions/Roadmap:
Following questions are controversial and will eventually break somebody's electribe:
Q: Is it worth it at all? :D
Q: can the memory be upgraded, and would the OS still work.
Q: can a bricked electribe be overwritten/restored with the original flash?
A: probably yes! see this wikipage`
Q: can somebody learn something from the JTAG connector on the PCB?
Q: can somebody dump a SDRAM chip to a file? (where EMX samples are stored)
Q: what does the EMX/ESX setting on the PCB board do (indicates control surface?)
Q: what modifications are needed in order to succesfully flash an ESX with EMX firmware (and vice versa)
Q: what is the ROM ICE chip on page 1 of the service manual
Q: Can the samples of the EMX be replaced?
A: Probably yes, but not easily. The ESX uses 2x64MB SDRAM memory boards, and the EMX only 1x64MB. The ESX firmware (obviously) contains routines to change the SDRAM contents. In theory one could create a special firmware which would only have the purpose to flash the SDRAM using a 64MB prepared samplepack (SDRAM-dump e.g.) from a smartmedia- or SD-card.
Tools used so far:
- binwalk
- hexdump
- hexdiff
- vim
Scope
- The scope is to enable anyone to improve the firmware using free tools
- Tools as free tools: linux-tools, or windows tools which run in wine as well