Monday, 7 May 2012

Unbrick Samsung I9000 using Micro USB JIG

I unbricked my Samsung i9000 Galaxy S using a Micro USB Plug and 2 x 100K resistors. It was showing the classic bricked phone to computer with exclamation mark triangle in the middle :(.


From what I've read everyone uses a 301K resistor between the ground and the next closest pin to the ground, but it worked for me with 200K total resistance.
I used the connector from one of those cheap kits that allow you to charge most mobiles and stripped down the Micro USB's shroud (see photo).
I plugged it in making sure the phone was switched off. I then performed the get into download mode (Volume down button Home Button and Power button pressed together) this should then show the yellow download mode. This will allow one to recover the phone.

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

OpenWRT and the TP Link WR841N

The WR841N has no USB port on the case but USB is available on the PCB if you can solder and don't mind a bit of work to get it going. I had a problem getting the USB connection I made to the WR841N PCB working. I tried various flavours of patched firmware with no success, however on the OpenWRT Forum someone mentioned just use the TP Link MR3420 firmware. This I did and it worked straight away, smiles all round. I then got extroot to a 2GB memory stick working, this allowed me to add more packages. I added a USB hub to allow the connection of a USB webcam.

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

Getting the Arnova 9 G2 into Recovery Mode

To enter Arnova 9 G2 recovery mode, press the esc button then using a paperclip press the recessed reset button (its located on the top edge of the Arnova). It will now enter the recovery mode. A rooted verion of the Arnova9G2 firmware is available here. Plug in the micro USB to your computer I have Windows 7 installed. After a time it should show in the Windows 7 Device Manager with a RK29? Device, ignore the ? Now right click on the RK29? entry and select update driver. Then choose the browse option and navigate to the folder where you unzipped the file you downloaded previously, usually the Downloads folder, "arnova G2_full_root_rom_V1.0_arctools\drivers\32bit\win7" that contains the driver for your flavour of Windows 7, mine was the 32 bit driver. Once Windows has indicated that the driver install was successful you can now run the firmware update tool RK29update.exe located in the root of the arnova G2_full_root_rom_V1.0_arctools folder.
Update
I found that after the update I couldn't enter recovery mode it appears to be as described on Recovery Mode

Friday, 9 March 2012

OpenWRT MR3220 Command Snippets

Reset the OpenWRT on Router back to the default use the command mtd -r erase rootfs_data

Turn Wifi off uci set wireless.@wifi-device[0].disabled=1; wifi

Thursday, 8 March 2012

Using a clone image on new hardware.

The Centos networking will not work after the new hardware is using a clone image. The problem occurs because the MAC addresses on the new hardware don't match the MAC addresses in the config files of the clone image, these are the MAC addresses of the original hardware the image was taken from.

To get Networking working on Centos when using a cloned image, just modify the entries in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 ifcfg-eth1 and the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules files so that the eth0 and eth1 entries match the new hardware MAC addresses.

Restart the networking using service network restart and networking should now be working.

Friday, 17 February 2012

Add SSH public keys to a remote host

Nice quick way to add public keys to the authorized_keys file on a remote host
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@hostname

Monday, 13 February 2012

Rocks Cluster Compute nodes Ask for Password

After installing the compute nodes on a new Rocks Cluster it was found that a few nodes kept asking for SSH password. These should have been passwordless SSH and it was working on some of the compute nodes.

Try the following #rocks sync host sharedkey compute 

Try #rocks run host "/opt/rocks/bin/411get --all" 

if that works, 

Try #rocks sync users on the frontend

This cured the password prompt problem on the cluster.

Defender 300tdi Lucas 10AS Alarm Immobiliser (Spider) Problems

We have a 1997 Landrover Defender 300tdi that has given immobiliser problems intermittently. I had initially fixed the fuel solenoid as we w...