- e3-hacking - earth.li

Anyone want to buy an E3?
by David Reynolds 15 Nov '08

15 Nov '08

Anyone want to buy a used, working E3? It's got the system from here (http://the.earth.li/pub/e3/ ) running on it. I'm not answer much money, but the postage will have to be paid. Any offers? Thanks, David -- David Reynolds david(a)reynoldsfamily.org.uk

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E2 hackery & coding
by Dave Mills 14 Nov '08

14 Nov '08

Hi, I've been given an E2, it has never been connected to the 'phone line, so is still running factory fresh software. Has anyone managed to get their own code running on one of these beasts? Any pointers on where to start? cheers, Dave

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E1
by David Given 03 Oct '08

03 Oct '08

While doing some work on my E2 I managed the serial port. Apparently it doesn't like repeated power cycling. So I went scrounging on Freecycle for another one; I didn't get one, but I *did* get an E1. The E1 is a decidedly more primitive device than the E2. It's heavier and the styling is definitely older --- it's even got a BT logo on it! The screen is the same, but it's on a 2D swivel rather than the simple hinge of the E2 and E3. The keyboard has hard plastic keys rather than the soft rubber Spectrumalike keys of the more recent models and is actually surprisingly comfortable to use. Inside the case was a bit of a shock; rather than the elegant little PCB of the E2 and E3, there are two, count 'em, chunky PCBs wired together. Unfortunately the wiring loom is complex and well stuck on so I didn't want to tinker too much, but the CPU is a LH77790B. I did spot an Alliance AS4C1M16E5 2MB DRAM chip, though. The built-in software is pretty much identical to the E2. The 'Settings' menu claims it's got a Venus 33.6 ISA 1520-37LV modem and PBL V9.0 Build:0256. The interesting thing is round the back; instead of USB there's a 25-pin PC printer port, and instead of the EXP jack there's a standard female 9-pin serial socket. Plugging this into a PC with a straight-through serial cable shows nothing at all on boot. However, pinging it with the usual 0x1b bytes on startup triggers PBL and the LEDs start flashing. But I don't get anything back down the cable, so I can't talk to it. So either the protocol's different, or else it's non-standard wiring (or my cable is broken), or the E1 has a fried UART, or it might not be a standard port after all and may need level-shifting. I'll clean it up and post some photos at some point, but I suspect this is really only of historical interest. (I also got a Pocket Dockit. Can I do anything interesting with one of these?) -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ───── │ "...it's not that well-designed GUI's are rare, it's just that the │ three-armed users GUI's are designed for are rare." --- Mike Uhl on │ a.f.c

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e3-hacking starter guide
by Nathan Friend 02 Oct '08

02 Oct '08

Hi all, I've been lurking on this list for a while now. Are there any e3 hacking starter guides? I've got some e3's and would like to see what they can do. Cheers, Nathan.

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Simulation
by David Given 25 Sep '08

25 Sep '08

I know that both the e2 and the e3 are based on standard reference designs; does anyone know if these designs are sufficiently standard that I can usefully simulate either an e2 or e3 with something like qemu or skyeye without too much pain? ('Usefully' meaning at least a serial port. Graphics would be nice.) -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ───── │ │ "All power corrupts, but we need electricity." --- Diana Wynne Jones, │ _Archer's Goon_

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Running an IRC bot on the E3
by Jamie Powell 10 Aug '08

10 Aug '08

Hi, I'm something of a Linux newbie so be generous. :) I'm running busybox on my E3 as per the wiki and I also have a Pegasus USB Ethernet adapter working with a static IP on my LAN. Can anyone tell me: - What is the command to auto-configure the E3's IP address via dhcp? - Can I turn off the E3's LCD screen and just enter commands via telnet? - How can I compile and run Energymech (an IRC bot)? - How can I run dircproxy (a caching IRC proxy server)? In the case of dircproxy, I already transferred an ARM binary to the E3 via wget, chmod 777 and tried to run it, but I just got a 'permission denied' error. Would be grateful for any info. Thanks :)

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E3 PBL 5.1
by Ignácz János 28 Jun '08

28 Jun '08

Please help Amstrad E3 PBL 5.1 hacking linux howto. (Amstrad Delta - PBL V5.1 Build:1314) /IgiBoy

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u-boot-1.3.2
by Alexander 14 Apr '08

14 Apr '08

Hello! Someone was able to compile a u-boot-1.3.2 for E3?

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familiar
by Alexander 15 Mar '08

15 Mar '08

Hello! Once there has been quietly ... Someone compiling familiar to E3? Here (http://hu.gs/pub/E3/readme) the author mentions (and the photo shows) on the successful installation. Someone repeated?

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PBL 5.1 (again)
by Otaku 20 Jan '08

20 Jan '08

Hi All... Ok - took a break from my other shiny to finally play with my PBL5.1 E3 yesterday.. So - the current state of play is this : Sent Packet: 0x02 0x00 0x02 0x00 0x02 0x00 0x04 ( Version Query ) Rcvd Packet 0x02 0x00 0x0e 0x00 (STX header + length of packet ) 0x82 0x00 0x72 0x00 ( Response data ) 0x05 0x01 0x22 0x05 0x10 0x40 0xfe 0x7b 0x6e 0xb4 0x1a Viable commands without SHA-256 hash match are : cmd_2 cmd_9 cmd_15 cmd_16 cmd_16 is used to upload a ( as far as I can tell ) 392 byte authentication key. the key is hashed via sha-256 and, for any of the other commands not mentioned above, compared to the hash on the box. If the generated hash matches the stored one, the command executes, if not, it doesn't. For the interested, I believe the hash is : char SHAHASH[0x20]={ 0xAD,0xA2,0x8D,0x8B,0x4A,0xE7,0x12,0x15, 0x05,0x30,0x98,0x91,0xB1,0x01,0x09,0x24, 0x2B,0x32,0xDE,0xCE,0x67,0x88,0x94,0x81, 0x18,0xA5,0x0B,0x9C,0xB5,0xBD,0xDC,0x24 }; aka: 0x8B8DA2AD 0x1512E74A 0x91983005 0x240901B1 0xCEDE322B 0x81948867 0x9C0BA518 0x24DCBDB5 I'm currently going over the code to see if there are any sneaky bypasses, but it doesn't look good so far. I'll let y'all know if anything progresses. Happy sunday. Jake One thought does strike, however.. 392 bytes is kind of a strange length for a plaintext source for the hash. Makes one wonder if its a (X)PGP ascii signature. As always, reality may bear no resemblance to the statements above.

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