Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

There a many, many, e-book reader devices available these days, and they're quickly becoming pretty affordable. The currently cheapest device in Germany (that I know of) is the TrekStor eBook Reader 3.0, model number EBR30-a, at 59.- Euros via Weltbild or Hugendubel.

The device has an 800x480 7" TFT (yep, no e-ink), 2100mAh battery, it can display PDFs, EPUB, and TXT files (and Adobe DRM crap, which I don't really care about), it has an accelerometer which allows for landscape/portrait switching, it can play MP3, OGG, WAV, and WMA audio files (headphone jack), it can display pictures (BMP, GIF, JPG, even PNG, though that's not mentioned in the vendor's specs), and it has 2GB internal storage for books/music/pictures. Uploading of (non-DRM) content is done by a simple file copy, it enumerates as a standard USB mass storage device with FAT filesystem. It's a relatively nice reader for the price, I've read a few PDFs (datasheets, presentations) on it in the subway/train while listening to music from the device and it's quite OK for my purposes. So much for the review part.

However, I didn't really buy it for reading books on it, I was more interested in taking it apart, of course ;-) My hope was that it would turn out to be a really cheap device running Linux/U-Boot which would be perfect for playing around with embedded Linux stuff. Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky (it seems).

I've posted a few photos of the device and its hardware components on my flickr account and over at randomprojects.org, together with all the information I was able to find out so far. Here's a quick summary:

• Main CPU/SoC: FI E200 B6077BA 26P1
• RAM: MIRA P3S12D40ETP (512MBit / 64MByte DDR SDRAM, max. 200MHz)
• NAND flash: Samsung K9GAG08U0E (16GBit / 2GByte, x8, 3.3V)
• Battery management: KrossPower AXP199 A5004AB 36G
• RTC/clock/calender chip (I2C): H8563S
• Some accelerometer (to switch between landscape/portait mode), model unclear so far, maybe the chip labeled 605 132?

There are public datasheets for most of the hardware components (see randomprojects.org for links), but unfortunately the most important one (for the CPU) is not yet found/identified. I was told that the CPU/SoC is probably based on an ARM9 (ARM926EJ-S) core and the firmware running on it seems to be some uCos-based RTOS (not Linux, unfortunately).

So far I was not able to find out the vendor name or website of the "FI E200" CPU/SoC (let alone any datasheets), any hints would be highly appreciated. I checked arm.com: Processor Licensees, but the only two companies whose name starts with "F" having licensed an ARM9 core are Fujitsu and Freescale, which doesn't fit, I think?

I could (and probably will) check the PCB for RX/TX lines on an UART and/or JTAG pads (none are obviously labelled), and given that it's and ARM9 core there is a good chance that OpenOCD can be used and that a standard cross-gcc toolchain for ARM will work. However, that is all pretty pointless until it's clear which SoC exactly is used, and thus whether there is already Linux and/or U-Boot support for it and/or whether datasheets are available so that the respective code could be written. Without datasheets, this is going to be a pretty painful experience, not really worth investing much time, IMHO.

If anyone knows more about the vendor/device and respective datasheets, please let me know. Thanks!

Update 2012-04-19: I found the UART TX pin a while ago, a bootlog is available. The CPU and all other chips are also known now: The SoC is an Allwinner Technology F1 E200, the orientation sensor is a MEMSIC MXC6225XU.

Forgot to mention this here: We released flashrom 0.9.4 a few days ago, the latest release of the open-source, GPL'd ROM chip flashing software for Linux, *BSD, DOS, and partially also Windows (work in progress, though).

Here's a quick summary of the release announcement. Some of the noteworthy news items include:

• Support for new programmers: OpenMoko Neo1973/Neo FreeRunner debug board version 2 or 3, Olimex ARM-USB-TINY, ARM-USB-TINY-H, ARM-USB-OCD, and ARM-USB-OCD-H, Open Graphics Project development card (OGD1), Angelbird Wings PCIe SSD/88SX7042, ITE IT85xx embedded controllers, Intel NICs with parallel flash.
• Dozens of added flash chips, chipsets, mainboards.
• Improved Dediprog SF100 support.
• Add support for more than one Super I/O or EC per machine.
• Always read the flash chip before writing, for improved error checking and faster programming.
• Enable write support on NVIDIA MCP6x/MCP7x.
• Lots of bugfixes, documentation fixes, internal improvements, etc.

Get the latest release tarball, or download and build the most recent version via Subversion:

  $ svn co svn://flashrom.org/flashrom/trunk flashrom
  $ cd flashrom
  $ make

I already updated the Debian package to 0.9.4 (it has also already migrated to Debian testing and Ubuntu), other people have updated Fedora, Gentoo, NetBSD etc. etc.

There's already a huge amount of patches queued for the next release, including support for even more programmers, PowerPC support (tested on Mac Mini and others), and of course the usual "more boards, more chips" items...

I recently got myself a FONIC account for mobile Internet. This (German) prepaid-provider offers a "daily flatrate" for 2.50€ per day. After the 10th day of usage (i.e., 25€) you don't pay any more. This means, even if you need mobile Internet access 31 days a month, you only pay for 10 days. After 500MB/day or 5GB/month you're throttled down to GPRS speed (but you can still connect, and you don't pay more).

The FONIC account comes with the "FONIC Surf-Stick", a Huawei E1750 HSPA USB modem (apparently it supports GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA (up to 7.2Mbit/s), HSUPA (up to 5.76 Mbit/s), and a SIM card.

In order to use the device on Linux you need two packages, usb_modeswitch and wvdial:

  $ apt-get install usb-modeswitch wvdial

Recent versions of usb_modeswitch (and matching udev entries) already support the Huawei E1750 out of the box, a few seconds after attaching the device it's automatically switched into modem mode. After this has been done you should have three new serial devices, usually /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, and /dev/ttyUSB2. You'll need /dev/ttyUSB0 for talking to the device using AT commands. The lsusb output should look like this (see here for full lsusb -vvv):

  $ lsusb
  Bus 001 Device 045: ID 12d1:1436 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 

(before usb_modeswitch was run, the USB IDs were 12d1:1446)

The required settings for connecting are documented at fonic.de, specifically the APN (pinternet.interkom.de). A username and/or password is not required. You need to provide your FONIC PIN though. Dialing is done using the *99# number and using the ATDT command.

I'm using the following wvdial config file:

  $ cat /etc/wvdial.conf
  [Dialer Defaults]
  Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
  Baud = 460800
  [Dialer pin]
  Init1 = AT+CPIN=1234
  [Dialer fonic]
  Phone = *99#
  Username = foo
  Password = foo
  Stupid Mode = 1
  Dial Command = ATDT
  Init2 = ATZ
  Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","pinternet.interkom.de"

For mobile Internet access you would do the following:

If everything worked fine you should now have connected successfully.

There are other alternatives for achieving the same result, including umtsmon (Qt3 in the last release from 2009, looks a bit unmaintained), kppp, the GNOME NetworkManager, and others, but wvdial worked OK for me.

For more details about the Huawei E1750 device (e.g. lsusb -vvv and more photos), see my wiki page at

  http://randomprojects.org/wiki/FONIC_Surf-Stick_Huawei_E1750

Update 2011-08-03: My measured download speed for a Debian ISO (over HTTP via wget, at night, roughly 22:00 o'clock) is 350-470 KB/s in case anyone is interested. During this download the blue LED on the stick was enabled, which denotes a UMTS connection (green == GPRS/EDGE, turquoise == HSDPA).

It's been a while since my last blog post, and also quite a while since my last item in the "Testing stuff with QEMU" series, so here goes.

I'm using this QEMU image to do compile-tests on the PowerPC architecture for various software projects, especially flashrom (open-source flash ROM programming software).

So here's how to install Debian GNU/Linux on PowerPC (in QEMU):

1. Install QEMU:
   $ apt-get install qemu
2. Create a (resizable) image which will hold the installed OS. Use the relatively new "qcow2" QEMU image format, which will only take up as much space as is really needed and has some other nice features (compression, encryption).
   $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 debian_powerpc.qcow2 2G
3. Download a Debian installer ISO for PowerPC:
   $ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/5.0.8/powerpc/iso-cd/debian-508-powerpc-netinst.iso
   Note: For some reason, the current Debian stable 6.0.2.1 ISO didn't work for me (red screen with undefined error during the install; didn't look into the issue, yet). Using an older 5.0.8 image worked fine.
4. Install Debian in the QEMU image:
   $ qemu-system-ppc -hda debian_powerpc.qcow2 -boot d -cdrom debian-508-powerpc-netinst.iso
   The installation is nothing really special, you'll know almost everything from your usual x86 installation procedure. Note that you have to use "qemu-system-ppc" (not your usual "qemu"), of course.
5. After the install has finished, shut down QEMU; from now on you can boot it with:
   $ qemu-system-ppc -hda debian_powerpc.qcow2

See the screenshots for some system info. By default an OpenBIOS firmware and the quik bootloader is used, the emulated "machine" is g3beige (Heathrow based PowerMAC). You can use QEMU's -M and -cpu options to select different machines or CPUs.

Hope this helps.

If you're following me on identi.ca you probably already know that I've been designing a small PCB for a USB-based SPI chip programmer named openbiosprog-spi.

The main use-case of the device is to help you recover easily from a failed BIOS upgrade (either due to using an incorrect BIOS image, due to power outages during the flashing progress, or whatever). The device only supports SPI chips, as used in recent mainboards (in DIP-8 form factor, or via manual wiring possibly also soldered-in SO-8 variants). It can identify, read, erase, or write the chips.

Of course the whole "toolchain" of software tools I used for creating the hardware is open-source, and the hardware itself (schematics and PCB layouts) are freely released under a Creative Commons license (i.e., it's an "Open Hardware" device). The user-space source code is part of flashrom (GPL, version 2), the schematics and PCB layouts are licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and were created using the open-source Kicad EDA suite (GPL, version 2).

The schematics, PCB layouts, and other material is available from gitorious:

  $ git clone git://gitorious.org/openbiosprog/openbiosprog-spi.git

You can also download the final Gerber files (ZIP) for viewing them, or sending them to a PCB manufacturer.

Some more design notes:

• The device uses the FTDI FT2232H chip as basis for USB as well as for handling the actual SPI protocol in hardware (MPSSE engine of the FT2232H).
• Attaching the SPI chip:
  • There's a DIP-8 socket on the device so you can easily insert the SPI chip you want to read/erase/program.
  • Optionally, if you don't want a DIP-8 socket, you can solder in a pin-header with 8 pins, which allows you to connect the individual pins to the SPI chip via jumper wires or grippers/probes.
• The PCB board dimensions are 44mm x 20mm, and it's a 2-layer board using mostly 0603 SMD components.

Basic usage example of the device on Linux (or other OSes supported by flashrom):

  $ flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=A -r backup.bin (reads the current chip contents into a file)

Over at the main projects page of openbiosprog-spi at

  http://randomprojects.org/wiki/Openbiosprog-spi

I have put up a lot more photos and information such as the bill of materials, the Kicad settings I used for creating the PCBs, the Gerber files and the Excellon drill files and so on.

The first few prototype boards I ordered at PCB-POOL.COM (but you can use any other PCB manufacturer of course), the bill of materials (BOM) lists the Mouser and CSD electronics part numbers and prices, but you can also buy the stuff elsewhere, of course (Digikey, Farnell, whatever).

I already hand-soldered one or two prototypes and tested the device. Both hardware and software worked fine basically, you just need a small one-liner patch to fix an issue in flashrom, but that should be merged upstream soonish.

In order to make it easy for interested users to get the PCBs I'll probably make them available in the BatchPCB Market Place soonish, so you can easily order them from there (you do still need to solder the components though). Note: I'm not making any money off of this, this is a pure hobby project.

All in all I have to say that this was a really fun little project, and a useful one too. This was my first hardware project using Kicad (I used gEDA/PCB, also an open-source EDA toolsuite, for another small project) and I must say it worked very nicely. I didn't even have to read any manual really, it was all pretty intuitive. Please consider not using Eagle (or other closed-source PCB software) for your next Open Hardware project, there are at least two viable open-source options (Kicad, gEDA/PCB) which both work just fine.