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. Posted in home entertainment hacks, Linux Hacks Tagged Android TV, linux, set top box If you’d like a little bit of history on hackable Linux devices, have a read of one of our earliest posts featuring the Linksys WRT54G.

Perhaps it’s more useful as a small headless Linux machine than as a desktop, but we sense there are more machines to come in this line. These boxes are handed out in the hundreds of thousands by home connectivity providers, so there’s value in this type of hack as they become available for experimenters. From there a Linux installation could be assembled, and even an AFCE desktop. The CPU is an Amlogic quad core ARM Cortex-A53 SoC, which by a stroke of luck is a target for which an Armbian build is available. From here with a bit of effort the eMMC storage could be dumped, and from that the nature of the machine could be deduced. This outputs all sorts of interesting boot information, but can be dropped into a uBoot shell. The method starts as you might expect, by identifying a mystery connector as a debug serial port.

Now it might just be back, as shows us an Android TV set-top box from a mobile carrier repurposed as a Linux computer that can even run a desktop environment. Routers as small computers were displaced by small cheap Linux machines from the likes of Raspberry Pi, and the promise of discarded home network gear doing interesting stuff receded.

An echo of this era lives on in the name of the OpenWrt minimal Linux distribution, in reference to the Linksys WRT54G router which started it all. There was a time around two decades ago, when the new hotness was taking control of home routers to use as small Linux computers.

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