Hjalfi reverse engineers an Alphasmart Dana laptop thing: #1, figuring out the debug port
Channel: Poking Technology
Date: 2021-08-16

In whch yr hmbl svt rather incompetently figures out how the Alphasmart Dana debug port works, allowing direct access to the CPU while bypassing the boot ROM.

The Dana is a rather nice PalmOS-based mini laptop based around a Dragonball VZ system-on-a-chip processor and loads of flash and RAM. This is a 68000-compatible 33MHz processor which turns out to be rather well documented, and it has a very nice boostrap feature; assert the right signal pin and you can remote-control the CPU (to a certain extent) via the UARTs. This has possibilities...