PACE DIT7431/05 (Black BT box) + Linux?

[is0-mick]

Been thinking about this the last few days..
The main chip on this is the same as the DM500HD receiver, I'd think both boxes would adhere to the same reference design or be very similar, seeing as most of the components are on a single chip.

Both boxes also appear to be little endian, so in theory it should be possible to use the DM500hd kernel / drivers on this box...

Due to jtag being disabled, I think the process of testing this would be more complicated than normal, not easy, but not impossible...

Any thoughts?

Mick

[towme]

Hi guys,

I have a cisco isb 6030 lying around for approx. a year now and thought that i could use it as a mythv frontend.
then i found your forum where I read that these boxes are not x86, so little chance. Then i dismantled my box and realised that its not a sigma chip but a broadcom 7405.
So I googled again and found that broadcom supports linux and also found two interesting hardwares:
- roku picture bridge hd (which already has mythfrontend ported to it and has mips architecture)
- hummy.tv (which is a broadcom 7405 based stb with a complete linux firmware modified to watch video over the lan)

what do you think can this three (cisco, roku, hummy something) be brought together?

I have some linux compiling skills, some arduino knowledge (for the ejtag and atmega) and am willing to try risky things because don't really care if I brick the thing. Its not much use to me now, so if I can come to something its nice but if I brick it I still can use the hard drive.

tom

[Niko]

Hi there

This is a long shot but just maybe you can help me with the problem I have with my BT Vision set top box which is actually the Pace DIT7431.

I have been using this without problem with my BT Infinity fibre optic broadband for some months. However I now need to set up a VPN connection to my office and this is not possible with the bt supplied Home Hub.

The IT support company from work have therefore supplied me with a Draytek Vigor 2850 vdsl router.

We set this up and it worked fine until I tried using the bt vision box. Unfortunately we could not get it to connect to the Internet. The router was giving out an ip address to the device but something is preventing it connecting and enabling me to access the on demand services.

Can anyone advise what may be preventing connection and suggest how this problem can be overcome?

[is0-mick]

Not sure on that one, seems a little strange, as I'm not even on BT or using a BT router. I was using a draytek vigor 2600 and the box connected to the internet no problems for updates etc.

Is there not a diagnostic page? or you could try the BT help forums?

Mick

[Niko]

Hi Mick

Have now established that the btvision set top box will only connect if it receives a ip address in the range 192.168.1.60/253

When we got the Vigor router to give out within this range it works
However once we set up the router with a VPN tunnel back to the work network it needs to be on a different range (192.168.10. xxx)

Is there any way to change the set up on the bt vision / pace DiT 7431-05-3/405 set top box to operate over different ip range?

Unless there is it looks like I will have no option but to get a second telephone line and broadband connection which seems excessive

Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide

Niko

[is0-mick]

Is there not a settings page for the BT connection? I seem to remember a diagnostic page or network setup page? Have you tried changing that manually to match your 192.168.10.x setup?

I'm on a 10.0.0.x range, and the BT box seems to download updates.
I'm not on BT and don't have BT service, but it still seems to attempt to connect ok.

Mick

[AnonCh4rl1]

Been thinking about this the last few days..
The main chip on this is the same as the DM500HD receiver, I'd think both boxes would adhere to the same reference design or be very similar, seeing as most of the components are on a single chip.

Both boxes also appear to be little endian, so in theory it should be possible to use the DM500hd kernel / drivers on this box...

Due to jtag being disabled, I think the process of testing this would be more complicated than normal, not easy, but not impossible...

Any thoughts?

Mick

Have you tried the JTAg are you sure it's disabled? I only ask because there is mention of the JTAG points on another thread but no other info,

So does the CPU have a hypervisor type thing that restrics the code it runs?
Does this hardware run WinCE or embeded linux, If its windows I don't think I want to waste my time on it.

[AnonCh4rl1]

Found some interesting info here:

http://hardware.wikinet.org/wiki/BCM7405

The BCM7405 contains three 16550A UARTs at the following addresses:
0x10400b00 - 0x10400b3f : UART 1
0x10400b40 - 0x10400b7f : UART 2
0x10400b80 - 0x10400bbf : UART 3

It says this ET9000 device also uses the same Broadcom chip so may be similiar to what is described here:

http://hardware.wikinet.org/wiki/ET9000

Boot process

Start executing instructions at 0xbfc00000 (boot flash, contains bootloader based on Broadcom CFE).
Initialize early boot console at UART0.
Basic CPU / system setup.
Start Broadcom CFE.
Search for flash image on external USB drive.
Offer flashing boot flash or NAND flash if flash image was found.
Load kernel in GZ compressed ELF format from NAND partition nandflash0.kernel.
Execute Linux kernel.
Load AES encrypted Broadcom drivers.
Run Enigma2 STB firmware.