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Ok, maybe this device is not an iPad killer - the iPad is an impressive piece of technology with an impressive price tag. What we have here is the sub $100 China version: A 7" Wifi enabled touch screen running Android 1.6 for the price a digital picture frame was a year ago.

I had my unit for a few weeks now and in spite of some shortcomings, the unit was worth the money. The processor, running at 350Mhz, is not the fastest and makes the pad a bit unresponsive at times. Also, a hardware video decoder would be nice, since currently the pad only plays iPod style mp4s.

So what are the specs? It took a bit to be actually sure about this, but based on forum posts and data sheets, the following seems to be true:

- VIA/WonderMedia WM8505 at 350Mhz (yes, even plenty of sites claim 600Mhz.
- 7" TFT LCD 800x480 with resistive touch screen (no multi-touch)
- 128MB DDR2 SDRAM (running at 600Mhz?)
- 2GB Internal flash for OS and preinstalled apps (1.5GB or so available)
- Wifi (internal) b,g
- Internal LiPo battery, lasts 2-4 hours depending on use (Wifi: 2.5 hours max).
- USB, headphone plug, microphone, G sensor

The unit comes usually with Android 1.6 - the ARM core in the WM8505 is to old to run Android 2.1, so there is not going to be a newer Android version for this device, but Windows CE is also available as a firmware choice.

While this device has some shortcomings, for the price point of just over $100 it is hard to not recommend it regardless.

It is available on DealExtreme.

I will keep adding to this post as I figure out more about this device.
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This is another recent piece of woot-loot I got. For $20 bucks I was able to pick up this Internet-enabled talking weather station plus external wireless sensor. The pitch was to have Internet updated weather forecasts for my location, plus my choice of news feeds, all spoken at the push of a button. On top of that, the unit makes the reading of the local wireless sensor available on the Internet.

When the unit arrived, first impressions were not that great: the unit came in the blister pack from hell. Honestly the worst packaging I have ever encountered. Beyond that, the weather station feels a bit cheap, with one of the volume buttons working but lacking the "click" feel of the other buttons. Included was also a small dongle with an Ethernet port and the wireless external sensor.

The setup of the unit was pretty easy, although the setup is a bit odd - the unit uses an Ethernet dongle to connect via a proprietary 915Mhz signal to the station. Notable was the huge selection forcast location, including local landmarks which enabled me to set the location within a few blocks of my residence. Once done with the setup, the unit set the time correctly, downloaded the forecast and connected to the external sensor. Getting the unit registered with the Weather Club, aka the site were you can see your sensors temperature on the 'net, was a bit more of a hassle, but multiple tries were eventually successful.

The unit does mostly everything that was advertised - the forecast is spoken with computer text-to-speech in an alternating male and female voice, same for the 3 news feeds selectable. While the forecast is pretty useful, the selection of the "news" feeds is more then limited. As a matter of fact, the selection lacks any real "news" and has barely more then a few cnet and zdnet feeds available - the option of custom RSS feeds would be really nice here.
The feature of the station to make your local temperature available over the Internet generally works, but requires the use of the somewhat poor knock-off of My Yahoo! including empty (thanks to adblock) advertisement window - the temperature in anything more usable, like a feed or widget for my site, is missing.

On the good side, a call to Weather Direct's customer service number was handled promptly and was followed thru with an email - compliments to a good US based customer service department.

After a few days I wanted to find out more about the unit, partially motivated by the lack of custom RSS feeds. I look inside the station did not yield much - custom chips all around. I was curious if the unit actually contained a text to speech engine or just downloads compressed audio over the 'net.

I tried to find out more about the Ethernet wireless dongle and came across this site exploring a different Weather Direct model. Based on the info on that page, I hooked my dongle via an old hub to WireShark and started taking a closer look.



The result was unfortunately not what I had hoped - instead of a build in TTS engine the unit just seems to play really low quality mp3 files. I didn't really go much further at that point, since I was hoping for a talking RSS reader and not an wireless low-fi mp3 player.

Beyond the set-back on the TSS engine, the unit is ok. It does what is advertised, although the crappy selection of "news" really hurts the unit in my book. If you like an instant weather forecast and can live with the cheap feel of the unit, for the right price I would go for it again.]]> http://www.blogofrevelation.com/index.php?entry=entry091224-194533

The future has arrived in form of the Spykee Wifi robot. While the product is clearly aimed at a young audience, I stumbled across it during a recent Woot-Off and for $100 it became mine, because once you look beyond the toy appearance you will find some interesting stats:

• 200 MHz ARM9
• 32Mb SDRAM
• 4Mb NOR Flash
• WiFi client 802.11b/g
• USB host
• 8-bits VC to control the dual DC motor and control the charge
• 4 status LEDs
• Infrared receiver
• Charge control for the 9.6V NiMH battery
• JTAG / Serial / port i2c port available
• Loudspeaker 8 Ohm 2W
• Audio sampler microphone 16bits / 16 kHz
• Sampler speaker 16bits / 8 to 48 kHz

Yes, you will find all this inside the base of this toy, plus it comes with a web cam with build in microphone and white LED. As the final touch, the unit can self dock and charge.

Since I left most of the plastic junk off the unit (only the webcam actually does anything, everything else is in the base.), I quickly turned this toy into a webcam I can drive around my house from work! My cats are not quite as excited by this:

The unit is controlled via a proprietary software available for Windows and Macs, but the protocol has been deciphered and alternative software is in the early stages of development. The unit can be used in ad-hoc mode or with an access point - and if you know how to open up a few ports, it can then be controlled from anywhere in the world with Internet!

The track drive on the unit works great when it has to overcome an occasional sock or cord, but cannot handle any stairs or otherwise non-flat surfaces. The camera produces good video at 320x240 and the internal speaker and microphone on the unit do their job just fine. Only bad point so far is the battery run time, only around 15-20 mins of driving around time until the unit want to dock again.

In regards to hacking not too much done has been done with this robot, but firmware with USB and NFS mounting capabilities and telnetd running are available. One hardware modification was to add the ability to move the camera up and down to be able to see more - although I found that a $2.58 Wide-Angle "Jelly Lens" works even better to improve the viewing angle.

Unfortunately, Meccano has still no released the source code for the robot, in direct violation of the GNU/PGP licenses of the Linux firmware.

But even with those shortcomings, this is a great product. I wish it was less aimed at kids and that Meccano would take their developers more seriously, but it is a blast either way.
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While the WANSER-R was a great device, a recent upgrades to my storage space finally forced me to move away from FAT32 and in turn away from the WANSER-R.

As a replacement, I picked up the WLX-652 USB NAS from DealExtreme, my preferred Hong Kong seller. Equipped with two USB 2.0 ports and a build in BitTorrent client, plus support for NTFS and EXT2/3 it seemed like a good choice. A few weeks later the unit arrives and first impressions are good as well - the unit feels solid, is well made and seemed to initially work just fine.

However, after using the unit for a few days I quickly noticed some major drawbacks:

- Mounting of NTFS partitions is unreliable and access is quite slow
- The BitTorrent client requires all the units resources, making the SMB server unresponsive
- Worst Part: The unit would crash frequently, especially under high load.

After initially suspecting an overheating problem, I found out that the crashing issue seems to be fairly widespread with this units and even a firmware update did not resolve it. It seems to be a case of sloppy programing of the firmware.

Luckily, it turns out that this sloppy programing had some other side effects: It permits easy access to the units file system and in turn interested a group of users into hacking this device. The unit seems to be running on a Star 8132 system-on-a-chip, has 32MB memory and 4MB flash.

The result, the so called SNAKE OS Linux is not only stable, but has also been updated to contain the latest Transmission BT daemon, SSH support and an improved file system. I am currently running the SNAKE OS Beta 2r1 (and will soon be upgrading to the Beta 3) and I had up times of 10 days and more. You can find SNAKE OS firmware here:

DealExtreme NAS Google Group

Keep in mind that this firmware is beta and installing it may void your warranty, etc. I also want to mention that while this unit still supports NTFS, this support requires a lot of system resources and it is recommended that ext3 or ext2 is used instead, especially when using Transmission.

Update: DealExtreme started shipping a new version of this unit, marked as WLX 652R. The WLX 652R is NOT COMPATIBLE with the Smake OS!
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Here is the latest firmware I was able to obtain for my NAS adapter, 1.48a. If you currently have a branded firmware (including the 1.42b from the post below), you will not be able to use this firmware due to the OEM name/webtag check.

There is a way to circumvent this checkwebtag issue. The WANSER-R uses two verifications when a firmware file is uploaded - it checks the firmware header for the proper OEM name and the file checksum before updating.

Warning: Do this at your own risk. All instructions provided as is. This may damage ("brick") your NAS and/or result in data loss. Read full disclaimer here.

If you currently have a 1.39 or earlier firmware you do NOT need these steps - just upload the firmware file for the 1.48 should work. These steps assume that you have the 1.42 MRT version of the firmware installed (from previous blog post).

Firmware Version G5S5020300148A0 L:1.17 . If you go to http://NAS/__config.htm, you should see VENDOR="MRT"; CHECKWEBTAG="1" [...]

To circumvent the webtag check and to upload the 1.48a, follow these steps:

1. Download this 1.38 firmware file. It has been altered to contain the MRT webtag. I did this with a hex editor by just comparing with the 1.42 MRT firmware file.

2. Unpack and upload the R3282_1_38a_MRT_header.bin to your WANSER-R

3. The WANSER-R should "think" a few seconds after the upload before giving you the incorrect file error. This is because the file passes the initial header check, but not the checksum.

4. Now open man_firm.html on the WANSER-R to force the update
http://NAS/man_firm.htm

5. The unit should reboot and once completed will be running the 1.38 firmware again. If the unit does not reboot after the update wait 5 mins then reset it to default settings: Unplug, push and hold reset button, plug back in and wait for 30 seconds, while still pushing the reset button, then power cycle again.

6. Now just update your firmware to the 1.48a from this post, the 1.38 firmware will accept this file and it will change your vendor to BASIC and your webchecktag to 0: VENDOR="BASIC"; CHECKWEBTAG="0". Again, if the unit does not reboot after the update, wait 5 mins then reset it to default settings: Unplug, push and hold reset button, plug back in and wait for 30 seconds, while still pushing the reset button, then power cycle again.

Once you have the checkwebtag set to 0, you can upload any firmware - just keep in mind that any branded (MRT or Addonics) firmware version 1.41 or higher will set the checkwebtag to 1 again.

Good luck.]]> http://www.blogofrevelation.com/index.php?entry=entry090123-181604

After my efforts to add network attached storage to my Asus router failed (well, it did work, but only with USB 1.1 speed) I started looking for a flexible solution to attach a large hard drive to my network.

After looking at some strange IDE NAS drive enclosures on eBay, I came across the Addonics NAS Adapter - a small network dongle that provides the missing link between ethernet and USB. The feature list on the website was perfect, as the unit supports both SMB ("Samba" = Windows networking) and FTP and on top of that has a build in Bit Torrent client. For $55 the price was right and I ordered the adapter from ShopAddonics.com.

I have been using the NAS Adapter for a week now and I am quite impressed. I am using the unit with a 500GB Hitachi SATA drive in an USB 2.0 enclosure and the adapter recognizes and uses the hard drive flawlessly. Over SMB I get speeds around 8MB/sec when using Ethernet and around 2MB/sec over Wifi, which is in line with the expected speed for those networks. The NAS adapter runs smoothly even under heavy load (4 torrents, uploading to the HDD via wifi and streaming a video off the drive at he same time is no problem). The unit is entirely controlled via a web interface and can act both as a DHCP client or server. Both SMB and FTP allow multiple users and access levels.

The build in bit torrent client is reasonably fast and can handle up to 4 downloads simultaneously. Performance is quite solid and the unit is capable to resume downloads after a reboot (even though the manual claims differently).



Overall I am quite impressed with this small device and was curious to find out what's ticking on the inside. Unfortunately, the casing had no visible way of opening it and I didn't want to break the small device, so I did some Internet research.

What I found:

This device is an OEM product, meaning that Addonics only does QA control, but did not develop this unit. The 'official' part number seems to be WANSER-R. I was not able to find the actual manufacturer, but on the inside seems to be a RDC R3210 system on a chip. the R3210 is a 32bit RISC processor, running at 133Mhz. It has buildin ethernet and USB, plus dual DMA controllers, making it quite fitting for the job.

You can find the specs sheet of the R3210 in PDF here.

My Addonics NAS Adapter came with firmware 1.33c, which was stable but I found a 1.42b update on the this site (look for WANSER-R). Make sure you read the included readme. The 1.42b appears to be solid as well and I've noticed an increase in BitTorrent performance. Unfortunately, Addonics has not made any of the recent firmware updates available through their site. The unit appears to be linux based and there is an OpenWRT build for the R3210, but I did not make any attempt at flashing this unit with 3rd party firmware.
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The Russian DRSB-01 Geiger counter, a minimalistic Russian "main stream" radioactive radiation detector, stuck somewhere in 1983. I recall ordering mine several years ago, from the same seller, just for the fact that it was unique, cheap and reminded me a bit of my cold war kid childhood.

The device turns our to be reasonable well made, with a great sensitivity, making it a possible cheap tool for weekend antique hunters. While it has no scales, you can hear an audible click every time it detects radiation (just like in the movies!). It also has a green LED which also indicates the detection visibly and a red LED that appears be the GTFO, as it comes on at a certain detection rate. I tried mine with an old (non-Coleman) camping gas lantern "sock", which was supposed to be radioactive and the DRSB-01 goes totally nuts in direct contact with the plastic bag it was in.



Found the video above on Youtube. While I paid a bit less for my DRSB-01, since I bought it years ago, even at the current prices this seems to be a good value if you have a need for a simple detector style Geiger counter. The only annoyance is that my unit emits a high frequency sound that can get annoying if you can hear it. ]]> http://www.blogofrevelation.com/index.php?entry=entry081121-011158

The following item I found recently while browsing thru the vintage video game section of eBay. While the item is far from being vintage (Made in 2007), I was fascinated and decided to invest $20 bucks in this console, claiming to be a Nintendo Entertainment System clone and capable of playing NES cartridges.

The item arrived in a colorful box with instructions on the back. A/V cord and 2 controllers were included. The console itself is quite small (about 4 stacked CD cases) and very light, but the plastic case is well made and also the controllers are fairly decent. All cords are a comfortable 5 ft long, including the controllers.

After hooking the console up and inserting a Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge ($0.59 @ local GameCrazy) I push the power button and the console really seems to do what it claims: pretend to be a NES system. The picture quality is 'authentic' good and the sound, while a bit muted, is mostly accurate.

After playing Super Mario Bros for a bit I decided to try out Duck Hunt and got the original Nintendo Zapper from 1985 ($2.99 @ local GameCrazy). Since the unit has the original NES connectors, connecting was no problem and the Zapper worked like a charm. After trying a few different NES games, the only minor problems I could find was in Kirby, the sound seems a bit off and some minor graphics errors appear on the edge of the screen, but did not affect the game play.

Overall the unit is quite nice, on the inside a single custom chip seems to do all the work. For $20 bucks quite a travel back in time.

Want your own? Check out these eBay search results:
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