Piezo-Acoustic iPod Hack

jugander writes "nilss over at the iPodLinux Project (previously on /.) has performed one of the coolest and most bizzare hacks I've seen in a while. He was able to extract the bootloader from the 4G iPod by sounding out ticks with the iPod's squeaky piezo. With some tweaking and a makeshift recording studio, he was able to dump the 64 kb file at 5 bytes/sec. And yes, this means that 4G iPods can now boot linux!"

Its sweet but does it ahve a point?

[bird603568]

i know its cool to have a penguin on bootup, and play ogg vorbis, but is it worth 400$ and the possiblity of bricking it to get a less that ipod quality mp3 player?

The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usefull

[Space_Soldier]

According to an article, the iPod processor is too weak to run ogg. What is the point of running Linux on the iPod (besides saying that "we did it") if you one is unable to run a Linux application on it? Would not it be better to focus resources somewhere else?

Pot to Kettle

[Staplerh]

Could you please stop being silly and instead try and do something worth while.

O, bollocks - we could all do 'better' things with our time. Including stopping posting on this infernal website. You could have donated the time you spent reading this /. submission on charity.

Some people have fun doing things like this. Sounds useless to me as well, I'll grant, but I'm sure a lot of stuff that we all do seems useless/stupid to others. Like watching Star Trek re-runs.

Wow, just wow...

[still_sick]

The sheer creativity and resourcefulness of some Hackers is just mind-boggling.

If Apple / NASA / (et all) had any sense at all, they'd be beating down this guy's door to hire him into a think-tank.

Now This, THIS is why

[TheMysteriousFuture]

THIS is why I read slashdot. News for Nerds Stuff that matters.

All in favor?

Mod me down.

Pack your bags, we're going on a guilt trip!

[FreeUser]

Could you please stop being silly and instead try and do something worth while. We're still looking for a cancer cure, aids cure and countless other things we need today.

Fuck You.

He doesn't work for you.

If you care about those things, get off your lazy ass and do something about it yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you. Don't expect any of us to give a rat's ass about your agenda when we're working for free, on our own time.

But of course, I doubt you're one tenth as capable, or creative, as this guy is.

Re:Yup

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The sound output trick is clever, yes... and also really quite old and (until not so long ago) part of any embedded system programmer's bag of debugging trick, along with flashing LEDs, bit toggling on ports and other niceties. Hell, even the Linux kernel can oops in morse code through the PC speaker or the keyboard LEDs (iirc).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Yeah it's pointless..

[Second_Derivative]

but I remember seeing a Google application form somewhere with "What's the coolest hack you've ever done?" on it. Can you imagine putting "Dumping an 64k firmware chip through a piezo sounder" on that?

Who cares if it's not that useful, it's lateral thinking for you...

Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef

[drigz]

Couple of the coolest things so far:
Tetris
viP (text editing)

In the pipeline:
Doom
GameBoy Emulator

If you have any problems with the apple firmware, linux-on-ipod is the place for fixing that.

Also, another aim is to encourage people to look into their 'closed platforms'.

Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef

[Nessak]

Honestly, I can think of a hundred valid reasons to run Linux on an iPod. I plan on doing it soon, now that this very creative hack has been accomplished.

We know the ipod CPU power and abilities (in the 4G ones and up) is might higher then what apple is using it for. I would love to see an alternative music/playlist browser, as the one they have sucks when you have thousands of songs that all have different artists, albums, etc. All my songs are in mp3 (sorry ogg) so I'm not really concerned about playback of other formats. I know the ipod linux team has a long way to go, but you think with so many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of ipods, at least a few people would be interested in hacking it to do more then what apple wants.

Look at the TI calculators. They might be intended for mathematics functions but people have written thouands of programs that do a ton of different things. Some are pretty stupid, true, but some do some helpfully tasks. And if you bought the hardware, why should you not use it to its fullest extent?

Re:Hehee. Just like loading off a Cassette tape :)

[Stiletto]

Right now there are MANY P'o'd execs at Apple, and a bunch of engineers going crap (but quietly thinking man is this cool)

I don't know of any software or hardware engineer who would give a damn if one of their users coaxed something out of their product that they were told to try to hide. Most engineers understand the futility of trying to prevent users from accessing their code or data. I've never heard an engineer introduce the idea of encrypting their own data or code--the idea always comes from the bean counters or management.

Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef

[globalar]

It's not about Linux, music, or the iPod.

It's about hacking.

It's like when an artist draws something on a napkin. Creative energy expands in every direction.

Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef

[Kenshin]

Tetris - I have a tiny dedicated Tetris keychain that cost me $15 eight years ago.

Text Editor - WORSE than cellphone keypad text entry.

DOOM - Ya, like that's gonna go. The iPod occasionally gets choppy sliding levels of the menu.

Gameboy Emulator - One button + scrollwheel does not a GB emu make. Also, go scrounge up an original Gameboy for $10 at a flea market or something.

Re:Does this mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I understand the ipod has a dedicated hardware decoder for mpeg streams (mp3, aac) so not only does it use less power decoding mp3 and aac it doesn't use the cpu (maybe used for fairplay, I'm not sure).

Anyway Ogg playback was up to 90% of real time on the G3 Ipods last time I heard, so it may just be a few bright ideas away from ogg support.

However it is quite likely that even if full OGG support becomes available that few people would use it as it would drain the battery too fast.

Re:Does this mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that due to the way the hardware is designed, you only have a very limited amount of ram to use for 'fast code', any code outside this region has to be very expensivly swapped in (partially due to a bug in the CPU). the mp3 decoder just fits in, the ogg does not, as it requires more space to decode. So, it is not the raw CPU power, just an odd property of the cpu combined with the code and memory footprint size.

Re:Wow, just wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

The sheer creativity and resourcefulness of some Hackers is just mind-boggling.

Clever, sure. But remember this is how 300 baud modems work, too. This is also how fluke multimeters are tested in the factory. They have no IO, so they chirp data back to a tester.

What is clever to one person is old hat to many others.

Re:Does this mean?

[VoiceOfRaisin]

where do you get your info from? last time i looked the 4th generation ipods had SLOWER cpus than the previous models. i assumed this is what gave them the extra battery life..

Kudos for the old school....

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

This is reminiscent of certain payphones and CC Whistles.... Kudos for thinking outside the box - I am honestly more impressed with this than just about any hack I'v seen in recent months. And as for functionality - Who cares? Doing it for the sake of doing it - thats where things like Linux and the whole open source movement are founded.

Re:The iPod hardware is too weak for anything usef

[bob beta]

The hardware should always do exactly what the Hacker wants it to do, so long as it's physically possible.

Are you new here??