Kernel Labs

If I’m honest then I have to say that my family use our quad tuner Tivo a lot more than we use our seven tuner MythTV backend. Yeah, we record a lot of TV in our house.

When Tivo announced their iPad streaming solution back at CES 2012, I was quietly thrilled. I’m tired of being shackled to our primary TV and this promised to solve the issue once and for all. The launch was planned for September 6th 2012 and I was counting down the hours, ready to place an order and part with my $130 dollars. Time passed, the big day arrived. I placed my order and over the next few days the people in small brown trucks did their part. Summary: Problem solved.

The device arrived a couple of weeks ago and its working very well, nicely done Tivo! I’ve been using it every few days to stream content. Great video quality, no sync issues so generally I have no complaints. Now I can wander around house, watching all of those HBO shows I care about, total freedom. Yay!

Now that I know it’s reliable, time to pop the cover!

Flip the unit over, remove the blue rubber feet. You will see four T-10 security screws, remove them. The base pops out very easily. Note: You’ll need to replace the sticky tape that hold the feet on, once you remove the feet the sticky tape isn’t re-usable.

Oh, yes, the main chip has a giant fan on top to keep it cool.

Top of the PCB:

[lightbox title=”Tivo Stream Teardown” href=”/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IMG_2027.jpg”][/lightbox]

Bottom of the PCB:

[lightbox title=”Tivo Stream Teardown” href=”/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IMG_2026.jpg”][/lightbox]

Not a lot to see on the bottom but I did start poking around the connectors on the top.

Two connectors worth noting, the black 14pin connector with an interesting pin arrangement on the top side, to the left. Also the white four pin connector top side bottom right.

Based on some preliminary work with an oscilloscope and Saleae Logic analyzer, I’m pretty sure I’ve identified pins 2, 4, 6, 8 on the black header as an SPI interface, probably to the onboard NOR chips, more on those later.

[lightbox title=”Tivo Stream Teardown” href=”/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/SDI-pins.png”][/lightbox]

Also, the four pin white header on the top layer, see it bottom right? Pin nearest the right hand edge of the connector. What could it be?

[lightbox title=”Tivo Stream Teardown” href=”/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IMG_2028.jpg”][/lightbox]

And a deeper look with the analyzer, brought this:

[lightbox title=”Tivo Stream Teardown” href=”/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/UART-TX-Pin.png”][/lightbox]

That’s a 3.3v UART, it’s the TX line. Update: Pin to the left of it The pin two positions to the left (#3) is the UART RX. Pin #4 is 5V. Baud is 115200 8N1.

Nice!

Look what appears on the UART when the unit is powered on….

core clk:499500 kHz
ddr clk:531900 kHz
hpu clk:571500 kHz
ddr init[
ddr init]
chip init]
s_boot
C s(4010)d(80900000)(63236)
S s(13714)d(84000000)(170788)
Z s(3d238)d(84029b24)(869924)
sfw@800000
core_freq 499500000 hpu_freq 571500000

Starting kernel ...

Main SOC: Zenverge ZN200, confirmed by the bootloader output and much earlier by many other tech sites.

Atheros AR8151-B PCIe to Ethernet Core: Details.

2 x Samsung K4B2G1646C 2Gb DD3 RAM.

2 x Spansion FL128P1F 128Mbit NOR flash.

ALCOL AU6435. I’m not sure what this is, possibly a USB controller. Comments?

Samsung KLM2G1HE3F 2Gb NAND Flash.

…. I think it’s time to ask Tivo to release their u-boot and Linux kernel source…. yah think?

Enjoy!