Fortis 4th generation HD receivers: some info

[Audioniek]

Creating a .IRD flash file or the flash environment

About 7 months ago I was asked by the HDMU team to rewrite the flash environment found in the duckbox-developers git. The environment has been made consistent in particular in the aspects of screen output and terminology, and where applicable support for creating files for running an image off an USB stick has been added.
There is now only one command to start to create the output file after a build has been completed; just run

fakeroot flash.sh

in the flash folder. The script will use the file X/cdk/LastChoice to determine most of the information required and will proceed to ask some straightforward questions pertaining the destination of the result files. After that, the output file(s) asked for can be found in the directory X/flash/out. If on start it is determined that (some of) the flash tools needed are missing they are retrieved from the net, compiled and added.

When doing this job, I also added the then non-existent flash support for the 3rd generation Fortis receivers for both Enigma2 and Neutrino. In addition flash support for Neutrino for the 2nd generation of Fortis models with loader 6.XX was added, based on the experience gained developing the flash solution for the HS8200 with loader 6.00. Enigma2 is too large for these models as they only have 32 Mbyte of flash memory.

Because the 3rd and 4th generation of Fortis receivers effectively only differ in flash layout but not in technical approach and the 4th generation has been simplified by Fortis, it was relatively easy to add flash support for the latter. This environment has been in use during the ongoing development of Enigma2 for about 4 months now and I consider it stable and relatively bug free. As far as I know all HDMU images are created with a previous version of it.

Update (14/02/2015): the flash environment has been updated to support flashing the power on bootloader picture.

It can be found here: Audionieks Fortis-4G git.

More to follow...

Regards,


Audioniek.

PS. Please note that the duckbox/developers/flash git still has the old flash environment.