tinyhack.com

As listed on one of my previous posting, STAR 9100 (to be precise STAR 9104) is being used in these devices:

Coolmax CN-570 http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29899/75/1/3/
NS-348S http://www.multicase.de/en/products/76/ns348s.html http://www.enclosureservice.com/
Emprex NSD-100 http://www.emprex.com/02_products_02.php?id=205
Agestar NCB3AHT http://www.agestar.com/english/products/ncb3aht.asp
http://shenztech.com/code/ui/product/product.aspx?prdid=NAS2&subcatid=9
revoltec rs049

We can see from the boot log that says the machine is STAR_STR9100. Lately I have worked less and less on this device, because it has been running smoothly enough for me (I have run it continuously for a week). The last few parts is not so important for me. These four parts are RTC (turns out to be a very limited RTC), LED (only one LED inside the box, which is not very useful), and button (I have never used the button anyway), and Watch dog (this one might be useful, but I don’t have any documentation about this).

I am planning to stop further development. I was planning to build a custom firmware, but I think a full Debian distro is much better for me. But, if there are quite many people that uses this devices and are expecting something like NSLU2 (easy installer, etc), then I might continue the development. So, If you are using Agestar or agestar like devices, please leave a comment, and let me know what you expect.

If I am going to continue the development, I will need to buy another box, because I am currently using this one extensively for my daily activities. Irina (that is the name I gave to my NAS box) is now serving MP3, serving web page, and act as a download station.

I have spent many hours to work on the RTC part, and I decided to give up for now. I have been able to activate the clock, set the clock, and make it run. But the RTC is not useful. First, it is not battery backed, so when you turn off your device, it will not keep the time. Second, it can store only the seconds, minutes, hours, and day of month. The problem of not having a documentation is sometimes you get stuck, and don’t know what to try next.

There is one feature that is supposed to be useful if I can make it work: the alarm capability. With alarm some cron-like applications can set to be notified when a particular time comes (it will ease the CPU burden). As far as I know the cron daemon doesn’t use this feature, so it is not a great loss.

There is one thing that still puzzles me. The original firmware uses X1205 through I2C bus. From my understanding the X1205 have different abilities compared to the STR9100 RTC. So I don’t know whether there is actually another RTC on the board.

Since the RTC is not very useful. I will let go hacking this part, until I find other clues.

Here is the output of the original firmware.

X1205: I2C based RTC driver.
i2c-core.o: driver X1205 registered.
X1205: found X1205 on STR9100 I2C Adapter
ccr_write_enable: verify SR failed
i2c-core.o: client [X1205] registered to adapter [STR9100 I2C Adapter](pos. 0).
X1205: i2c_add_driver RTC driver.
X1205: misc_register RTC driver.