ebay find of commercial pogoplug mobile system

Earlier this year I made an ebay purchase of 10 pogoplug mobiles that had been used by Smartenit - Making your world smarter and greener The units had what appeared to be a wifi antenna added just above the reset button. These had been modified to run some type of management system and I hadn't been able to figure out how to crack access to the simple web page it hosted, so I set aside until yesterday. I opened one up and what I thought was wifi appears to be a Srvrbee Zigbee X10 Gateway hanging off the serial port. Which means they already have a nice plug soldered to the serial port that matches the serial port on the PogoPlug E02. Unfortunately the Linux installed on them is using the serial port to run the Zigbee gateway, so I wasn't able to get access to a root prompt, but I can break into u-boot. Following is a log of output from serial:

U-Boot 1.1.4 (Oct  1 2011 - 12:21:35) Cloud Engines 1.1.2 (3.4.27) PHYADDR=0

U-Boot code: 00600000 -> 0067FFF0  BSS: -> 006918B4

Soc: 88F6192 A1 (DDR2)
CPU running @ 1000Mhz L2 running @ 500Mhz
SysClock = 250Mhz , TClock = 166Mhz 

DRAM CAS Latency = 3 tRP = 3 tRAS = 8 tRCD=3
DRAM CS[0] base 0x00000000   size 128MB 
DRAM Total size 128MB  16bit width
Addresses 8M - 0M are saved for the U-Boot usage.
Mem malloc Initialization (8M - 7M): Done
NAND:128 MB
Flash:  0 kB

CPU : Marvell Feroceon (Rev 1)
CLOUD ENGINES BOARD: PPV4A1

Streaming disabled 
Write allocate disabled


USB 0: host mode
PEX 0: interface detected no Link.
Net:   egiga0 [PRIME]
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 

Loading from NAND 128MB 3,3V 8-bit, offset 0x200000
   Image Name:   Linux-3.3.8
   Created:      2013-10-23  18:11:35 UTC
   Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
   Data Size:    1072368 Bytes =  1 MB
   Load Address: 00008000
   Entry Point:  00008000
## Booting image at 00800000 ...
   Image Name:   Linux-3.3.8
   Created:      2013-10-23  18:11:35 UTC
   Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
   Data Size:    1072368 Bytes =  1 MB
   Load Address: 00008000
   Entry Point:  00008000
   Verifying Checksum ... OK
OK

Starting kernel ...

Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel.
^B^@^@^@<FF>^B^@^@^@<FF>Native drive probe not handled yet
Native drive probe not handled yet
Native drive probe not handled yet
Native drive probe not handled yet
Native drive probe not handled yet
^B^@^@^@<FF>^B^@^A^A^@<FF>^B^@^E^C^@^@^@<FF>^B^@^@^@<FF>^B^@^@^@<FF>^B^@^@^@<FF>^B^@^E^C^@^@^@<FF>^B^@^@^@<FF>^B^@^@^@<FF>

The noise at the end is my attempts to use Ctrl-Break and other serial input to get console access. Since I have easy access to the serial port I will be using kwboot to update uboot on these units and then boot Debian from USB. I'll then explore the installed software to see if I can locate the driver or whatever is necessary to access the ZigBee X10 Gateway.

I will have 6 of these units w/o power supply available to regular forum posters for the cost of shipping from Zip Code 30144 in the USA. PM me if interested.

Ray

Just booted uboot via kwboot and then booted from SD card on one of these units and noticed it appears to be running at 1GHz instead of the 800Mhz. So it appears that perhaps another modification is a faster clock. This can also be seen in the following line from the above log:

CPU running @ 1000Mhz L2 running @ 500Mhz

Ray

Hey Ray, about running off an SD card. Maybe this is a goof place to ask. I've been at the Armbian forum where there was a shootout with SD cards, and the bottleneck is said to be the SD card itself. Tony says dynamic voltage swings in the area between 3.3V and 1.8V brings out the best performance in an SD card, and on devices that don't have the dual voltage, a high end SD card's random I/O performance is no better than any junk SD card or USB 2.0.
So if I can find a way, on any device I have that runs the OS off an SD card, I'd like to find out what quality a card I should be putting the pennies toward. One Pogoplug Mobile and two Beelink X2s here apply.

Any thoughts in the middle of this tangent?

=========
-= Cloud 9 =-

For the Kirkwood based systems I have booting from SD I'm not really concerned about performance so I just use a decent quality class 10 SD card. I installed Armbian on the internal flash of my Beelink X2. My ODroid boxes I shelled out the extra money for the eMMC drives for those. I have a Pine A64+ also and I use the Armbian recommended Samsung EVO microSD on that.

Ray