WDTV Live -- Firmware Hacking Series -- Part 2

Building serial cable for WDTV Live motherboard

The motherboard has a serial port that could be used for directly interacting with the device (input and output). The official firmware doesn’t expose any means of terminal access via telnet, ssh etc., So as long as you are on an official firmware there is nothing much you could do with it. When booted, the serial port provides a root shell for directly interacting with the underlying linux. However, the prime use of the serial port is that, it provides input/output right from the time the device is powered on (for eg., once known you could interact with the boot loader etc.,) -- this is the piece that helps you unbrick or play around with much lower levels on the device.

In this post, I will take you through the process of building my own serial cable for WDTV Live. First problem, this is a hardware. So you need to really build tangible things; maybe procure stuff.

Here is the pin out for the serial socket on the motherboard.

The white socket at the bottom of the picture is the serial port. As seen on the picture, the pins are +5V, RX, TX, Gnd in the same order.

Before proceeding any further, one needs to understand the differences in voltage levels on various serial ports.

PC/RS232 serial port (ones that you see at the back of your PC) uses +3V to +15V for logical 0 and -3V to -15V for logical 1.

Most electronic serial adaptors (like the USB to serial convertors etc) and many micro-controller interfaces use 0V for logical 0 and +5V for logical 1 -- normally referred as TTL levels. The MAX232 chips are typically used for RS232 to TTL level conversion so that a micro controller could read/understand the signals to/fro a PC serial port. See my earlier experiment: Serial port logic convertor.

There are some devices which operate in LVTTL (Low Voltage TTL) levels wherein 0V for logical 0 and +3.3V for logical 1 is used. These convertors seem slightly uncommon (at least I could not easily find any convertors for LVTTL levels) and unfortunately WDTV Live operates at these levels on the serial port.

So to interface WDTV Live’s serial port to our PC, we need a USB-to-LVTTL serial convertor. I actually gave a try with my normal USB to serial convertor (TTL) and I did not succeed. The interesting thing is that, I could see a lot of characters scrolling on the screen but all were junk. Basically the ones and zeros were wrongly interpreted by the computer due to the voltage level differences. There were some references on the internet to bring down the voltage by introducing some resistors, but they didn’t work either. I didn’t try to do too much experiments, as I was dealing with a higher voltage (5V) while the serial port on WDTV Live is expected to handle only 3.3V. Better not to blow up something :)

In the internet, one cable that everyone talks about, for this use is Nokia CA-42 cable. Apparently, this cable from Nokia uses 3.3V LVTTL voltage levels to interface with the mobile phones. It looks like this (USB on one end, to the computer / proprietary socket on the the other end, to the phone).

After a lot of tries at various places, I got hold of this cable from ebay India. I could only get a “used” cable but I really wanted to give this a try. To be frank, these were really hopeless tries as I wasn’t sure what was ahead; there was a long way to go and lots of things needed to go right. When I received this parcel in my office in a dirty used box, some of my colleagues really thought I was going nuts with ebay that I was willing to pay for such dirty, used, old Nokia cable :) I really couldn’t explain all this stuff to them then. I didn’t have a compatible Nokia phone to test this cable; so until I got this whole thing to work I wasn’t even sure if the cable is in working condition. I had to confirm receipt on ebay even without testing, as I can’t test this in a day and to test this I was going to cut this cable anyways :)

This web site tells you about how to use a Nokia CA 42 cable to build a serial cable. Use it as a guide to get some useful info; it is not a bible to follow. Some of the details didn’t apply when I tested; These are the important gotchas that I figured out:

• CA-42 requires a driver and is available only for Windows. I used XP.
• It does work over VM. I used VirtualBox on Ubuntu to run Win XP.
• Important catch: CA-42 draws its power from the device, not from USB port (PC). This was very difficult for me to figure out. Some sites/forums explicitly mentioned not to make use of the +5V from the serial port of the WDTV. But unless you connect the +5V from WDTV’s serial port to the appropriate pin in the CA-42 cable and power on WDTV, CA-42 will not be detected on the computer. This was the most painful step.
• I had to connect all the 4 pins of the WDTV serial port to make this whole thing work! +5V, RX, TX, Gnd.
• Serial port settings → Baud: 115200, 8N1, no-flow-control, works.

That is all with the cable. Connect the cable, power on the device. Use HyperTerminal or ZOC (I prefer this), you are all set to interact directly with the WDTV.

How and what did I do to patch my own changes permanently into the firmware? stay tuned...