Guts of a Virgin (Electribe 2)

noobnr39 · Post by **noobnr39** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 3:04 am

Im new to all this electronic and IC stuff, im just wondering what you are trying to achieve with the measurements/detections ?

Flash memory coded firmare?

( im a complete n00b at this, but id love to learn )

cntrlchng · Post by **cntrlchng** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 3:24 am

I am, as well. I only know enough to be dangerous.

I guess I'm just interested in how it all works, and i think it would be fun to get under the hood and tweak things. I initially wanted to see if I could add/edit the oscillator patches, the parameters for the init pattern, and add more scales.

Just imagine you have a hardware platform that's designed for audio synthesis, which has a strong processor and an interface of buttons and knobs that work well for live composition, and you knew how to program it and add your own functionality... would be neat, right?

Poumtschak · Post by **Poumtschak** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 7:14 am

cntrlchng wrote:However, I was never able to detect the EEPROM IC8 (MX25L12835F) correctly, it was always acting as if the clip wasn't attached at all.

A 16KB FlashRAM chip can hardly contain the electribe 2 OS and PCM.
Maybe it's used to host the bootloader ?
Knowing next to nothing on this matter, I would tend to believe that when it come to functionnalities, building a custom firmware - JJ OS like - would be the way to go, though.

Which leads us to the second question : where are the OS, PCM, and user datas stored ?

Tom 62 · Post by **Tom 62** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:36 am

Poumtschak wrote:A 16KB FlashRAM chip can hardly contain the electribe 2 OS and PCM.

IC8 = 128 Mb Flash

Poumtschak · Post by **Poumtschak** » Tue Jan 13, 2015 9:43 am

Tom 62 wrote:IC8 = 128 Mb Flash

As already pointed out by cntrlchng, that's 128Mbit (16KByte).

specs sheet wrote:128Mb: 134,217,728 x 1 bit structure or 67,108,864 x 2 bits (two I/O mode) structure or 33,554,432 x 4 bits (four
I/O mode) structure

cntrlchng · Post by **cntrlchng** » Wed Jan 14, 2015 11:23 pm

Poumtschak wrote:Where are the OS, PCM, and user datas stored ?

I am also rather puzzled as well regarding this... where the hell are all of the sample stored, do you think...? or is everything so damned compressed they can fit it into the ROM?

EDIT:
Also, quick update regarding my previous post about not being able to read the ROM off of the eeprom ic... i think i have to de-solder it from the board to get it working... i'm not really sure i want to do this quite yet...

Poumtschak · Post by **Poumtschak** » Thu Jan 15, 2015 7:44 am

cntrlchng wrote:
Poumtschak wrote:Where are the OS, PCM, and user datas stored ?
I am also rather puzzled as well regarding this... where the hell are all of the sample stored, do you think...? or is everything so damned compressed they can fit it into the ROM?

The only chip that has enough built-in FlashRAM is the IC4 - ARM Cortex-M3 (MB9AF141LA) 40MHz Microcontroller

FEATURES
32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 Core
Processor version: r2p1
Up to 40 MHz Frequency Operation
Integrated Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller (NVIC): 1 NMI (non-maskable interrupt) and
48 peripheral interrupts and 16 priority levels
24-bit System timer (Sys Tick): System timer for OS task management
On-chip Memories
[Flash memory]
Dual operation Flash memory
Main area: Up to 256 Kbytes
Work area: 32 Kbytes
Read cycle: 0 wait-cycle
Security function for code protection

Edit : Doh! 256KB ain't much to store samples, so there must be some more FlashRAM or ROM somewhere.

So my guess is that the Cortex-M3 holds the OS, PCM, and user datas, and loads this to RAM at boot.
One would imagine the Cortex-M3 runs the low level stuff, slow I/O (MIDI), display, sequencer ? and drives the UI.
The higher speed or higher level stuff (SDCard, USB, maybe some audio stuff) being left to the AM1802.

Right or (most likely very) wrong, this is fun.

SMK · Post by **SMK** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 3:37 pm

To the biggest and brightest here....thank you all for making this thread! Thanks to Poumtschak, I was led here to discover that there are some pretty cool possiblites with the E2. In particular the possiblity that the new Electribe is OTG USB compliant...

Has anyone here gotten an OTG adapter like this one: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msu ... eed_Google

...and tried it out to see if it works or activated?

Or is it that the ability is there but there needs to be firm ware to activate it?

cntrlchng · Post by **cntrlchng** » Mon Jan 19, 2015 5:06 pm

SMK wrote:To the biggest and brightest here....thank you all for making this thread! Thanks to Poumtschak, I was led here to discover that there are some pretty cool possiblites with the E2. In particular the possiblity that the new Electribe is OTG USB compliant...

Has anyone here gotten an OTG adapter like this one: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msu ... eed_Google

...and tried it out to see if it works or activated?

Or is it that the ability is there but there needs to be firm ware to activate it?

I have access to otg cables, I'll give it a try

SMK · Post by **SMK** » Tue Jan 20, 2015 9:57 am

cntrlchng wrote:
SMK wrote:To the biggest and brightest here....thank you all for making this thread! Thanks to Poumtschak, I was led here to discover that there are some pretty cool possiblites with the E2. In particular the possiblity that the new Electribe is OTG USB compliant...

Has anyone here gotten an OTG adapter like this one: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msu ... eed_Google

...and tried it out to see if it works or activated?

Or is it that the ability is there but there needs to be firm ware to activate it?
I have access to otg cables, I'll give it a try

I still have not gotten a the adapter yet. any success using yours, cntrlchng?

dutchcow · Post by **dutchcow** » Tue Jan 20, 2015 11:22 am

Getting the service manual, that would be great.

cntrlchng · Post by **cntrlchng** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:40 pm

I think we should take a crack at disassembling the firmware update file.

256K · Post by **256K** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:48 pm

cntrlchng wrote:I think we should take a crack at disassembling the firmware update file.

i wish i had any useable knowledge.. but i dont. electromechanical engineer here.....

256K · Post by **256K** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:50 pm

i'm hoping for the day some genius cracks the firmware and starts making homebrew firmwares for this machine... that would be sooo gooooood

a boy can dream

dutchcow · Post by **dutchcow** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 5:10 am

I'm wondering about the internal sample and bit rates, and if there's a possibility to add some kind of digital/optical out. Not too sure if the hardware supports it. Need to read up on the amazing (and big!) list of chip-specs posted here

It would be nice to output everything digitally rather than exporting bad loops to Ableton or using the line out.

It seems there are some modding possibilities with this platform though. Hopefully there will be time to dust off ye old soldering kit soon

Update:
As a wannabe genius I did a little messing about with binwalker on the firmware file

It didn't find much interesting apart from a certificate used to sign the firmware, XML templates for Ableton, menu item names and a bunch of strings, most been mentioned here already.

It also mentions UART and bunch of debugging and testing options including a watchdog process and dump options for the memory/dsp, which could be interesting for accessing the system directly and gathering more information. Are there already pins somewhere for the port?

There are also 2 disabled items in the FX list inside the file

;

Scaled Randomizer
Transpose

A lot of stuff I haven't read yet, too much garbage to sift thought as of yet. And OSX has limited CLI tools, will have to boot in to Linux to get better info and try to disassemble this file properly.