[Vincent Deconinck] gave a fresh lease of life to an old set top box by adding a few Euro’s worth of hardware and some software smarts. The device in question is an old VOOcorder – a Cisco set-top box provided by VOO, his cable service provider in Belgium.
The VOOcorder doesn’t have any WiFi hardware or browser / app based interfaces. It’s a simple device controlled either via an IR remote or front panel buttons. [Vincent] added an ESP8266 and hooked it up to the IR receiver on the set-top box. He also set it up as an SPI slave to the front panel VFD display controller and connected it to the debug serial interface of the VOOcorder as well. The software, on the other hand, required a lot more work consisting of code running on the ESP itself, several HTML pages and JavaScript code for the browser front end, and a few scripts running in the background.
The result was bidirectional interactivity from within a browser, allowing him to send commands and receive status information as well as providing a user-friendly search interface. Further, his browser interface was integrated with information from the service providers website letting him do scheduling and recording of programs. The stuff that interested us is how he sniffed out the IR signals, figured out the SPI protocol used by the front panel controller, and implemented SPI-slave mode for the ESP8266. [Vincent] was surprised that such a cheap device could handle three distinct web servers while parsing two message streams without a hitch.
- Dish Network Duel tuner tv2 (360) 576-7100 DISH Network TV 2Video taken from the channel: Todd Addy How To Connect GOTV/DSTV Decoder To Two.
- India News: NEW DELHI: The government has raised concern over the safety and security of millions of set-top boxes installed at homes across the country.
Turning a cardboard box on its side and placing your laptop inside is a trick that lets you work outside in the sun but still see your screen. The hack has been shared online, with many people being impressed. On the hottest day of the year in the UK, I decided to try the technique and was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked. Beyond Indian; the hack feels desi, as the Chennai based mechanical engineer, has figured out a way to use his Kinect to control his Tata Sky set top box. He hooked up a Mac mini to his Kinect.
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It’s a great hack showing us how to use super cheap electronics to upgrade and modernize old hardware. Check out the two videos after the break – showing a demo of the hack in action, and a walk through of the hardware modifications.