RoboGuide

It looks like the new year is going to be promising. We have CES 2008 coming up in a few days, where we should get to see what WowWee has in store for this year. One possible product they will be releasing is the BladeStar, which appears to have been prematurely linked to off the flytech website.

Well, its been a while. I recently purchased a RoboPanda and have been probing its guts. While it has a lot of interesting bits and pieces, its hackability is not particularly high. It would be nice to figure out the modules though. To that end, I have figured out that the modules are SunPlus 8MB low voltage SPI ROM's.

Work on my new bootloader is going well, I have to functions to talk to the Flash EEPROM working properly, booting from USB seems to be working 100% now, and I can now read and boot from the NAND memory. An example is show below.

Hardware SetupNot everything was going well today. The hard drive in the my linux box is failing, I'm guessing the bearing have worn out, causing it to overheat and fail. I had a frantic few hours last night backing up all my data. Its not just the code for the bootloader I'm currently working on, its all the code I have written for the RS Media. Some of which serves as documentation for the things I have discovered about the RS Media.

Today, I finally got the my bootloader to read the Silicon ID details from the Flash EEPROM.

Nocturnal's RS Media BootLoader - Ver 0.2 (12/09/2007)
Flash EEPROM : Manufacturer ID = 00C2 Device ID = 22BA
MC9328MXL Silicon ID = 00000003