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Reciva project
The goal of this wiki is to gather information about the 'Barracuda' Reciva radio module, in order to understand enough of the hardware to be able to provide alternative firmware.
The problem is the following: If I correcty understand the underlying technology, it seems that all Reciva-based radios depend heavily, or even completely, on Reciva's database of radio stations. What will happen eventually is that for whatever reason (technical failures, maybe beyond control of Reciva) the central database will not be available. Maybe only for a few minutes, but such failurs might also take hours, even days. Apart from these technical issues, there will come a time - hopefully not too soon, but it will come - that reciva will no longer exist, or finds it no longer comercially viable to maintain the central database with radio stations. My concern is that this will render the wifi radios pretty much useless - no database means no stations, which means no sound.
The question is: should the users and buyers of these radio's worry about this? I think they should. When buying the device, you get access to 'thousands of internet radion stations from around the world', but this comes with a single dependency and a single point of failure: Reciva's database. I might be overreacting here, but in the past I 'lost' more devices because of similar issues. It's just *never* a good idea to depend on a single vendor, even if they do their job well.
Alternative firmware wishlish
- No dependancies on Reciva's database and servers
- Support for additional codecs and protocols
Roadmap
This list describes the things that would be needed to create a platform on which an alternative firmware implementation could be provided, roughly in the right order.
- Creating an inventory of the components on the Barracuda board and their functions, and gathering technical information about these componentes where available.
- Find out what the testpads on the Barracuda PCB do - Identifying JTAG and UART would be really helpful here.
- Get a linux (console) shell to work on the current firmware to be able to get info about how the official software connects to the hardware
- Figure out which pieces are missing to drive the hardware - Does Reciva provide drivers to all hardware ?
- Try to put as much pieces of the provided GPL code together to get a basic OS up and running.
References to more information
Pieces of info about the barracude module :
Other attempts to understanding the Barracuda
GPL software components
- GPL archives provided by Reciva