Zimoy: Unix meet Zillion MP3 player

NOTE0: my zillion pa30a just stopped working. Damn this hardware is CRAP. I changed it for a Thomson PDP 2448 that works out-of-the-box with NetBSD, FreeBSD, Linux and probably any Unix around as it is recognized as an umass device
READ THIS: DON'T BUY A ZILLION MP3 PLAYER, DON'T BUY ANYTHING FROM DIGITAL-SQUARE, they NEVER bothered reply to my multiples tries of getting some pieces of information about their crappy player.

NOTE1: 10 / 2004, I have now not enough time to work that hard on this driver, if anyone want to continue the job, he's welcome

NOTE2: THIS DRIVER "KINDA" WORKS, NOT FULLY USABLE

2004 - 01 - 27

Yes the project is still alive, I've just lots of work at this time. Stay tuned.

2004 - 01 - 17

I beleive I found the real problem with sizes and such, it really seems the header is causing troubles, they seem to have made more changes than I thought on the track info frame. I'd really need some usb snoops right now...

2004 - 01 - 14

Not much to say for the dev, but well, if you _really_ want to upload some stuff on your player, here's what to do (works under Net/FreeBSD). KEEP IN MIND the CVS tree is moving everyday / every hour, that's why what I will say here may not be applicable =)
Put the offset variable to, let's say, 0x10000, if commented, uncomment system(temp_buffer). Recompile zimoy (make). upload the mp3 with this command: ./zimoy -u /path/to/the/mp3
Note 1: the title will not be set
Note 2: don't forward / backward, il will break the mp3 size whle playing.

more to come, stay tuned

2004 - 01 - 12

Ok, I need some kind of genius, with a 0xab6c bytes long file, I need to switch from 0x1000 data len transfer to 0x64 at... 0x4fc1 before EOF. Does anyone see something here ???

2004 - 01 - 11

As a christmas gift, I got an MP3 player. Great ! you'd say, well almost. This device is not (far from it) recognized as an umass device, searching around, I found the chip inside of the beast has a very close instruction set to the Uproar protocol ( see here ).

The Zillion MP3 Player is an USB device, and I got a snoop trace (see here) of the traffic between the device and the application given by Digital Square to manage the player under windows. Note that if I was a windows user I'd be very angry about the poor quality of their software.

PLEASE NOTE, the userland driver I'm working on is _kind_ of working, just to warn, you can only download 1 song, the playlisting is really messy, so as deleting, formatting seems to work.
By now, I'm only working on NetBSD and FreeBSD, but I beleive very little work is needed to make it work under GNU/Linux.

Here are the 2 problematic points:

• playlist encoding: I got playlist titles, ids and such, each frame for a playlist entry is 0x280 bytes long. But I just can't find where the number of tracks is located.


• mp3 size setting: seems like the zillion can download with a data size of 0x1000 bytes, but it wants to get the finals blocks with a 0x40 data size. My question is: when does it want me to switch from 4096 bytes to 64 bytes data frames ? I tried lots of hypothesis but didn't found the good one, if anyone of you have any clue about this, feel free to send me some infos. I'd also be very happy to get some differents usb snoops...

For the brave

cvs -d ":pserver:anoncvs@gcu.info:/usr/local/cvs" login
password: anoncvs
cvs -d ":pserver:anoncvs@gcu.info:/usr/local/cvs" co zimoy
CVSweb: http://cvs.gcu.info/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/zimoy/

Infos

Many many thanks to

• Benoit Papillault for all his work on USB on Unices
• Kasima Tharnpipitchai
• The author of Sulu
• The author of the SpeedTouch USB driver for *BSD
• My wife who bought me the zillion ;)

Many UNthanks to

• Digital Square, for not giving me ANY info or even reply to the dozen of mails I've sent them, asking for some infos about the zillion.
• Samsung, for telling me then don't know anything about the zillion chip

Sure you recognized this websize design heh ? ;) (see here)