Hacking the LS350 Pager? 12
Crazy Corrigan asks: "I just got a new pager, bought and paid for by my office. I'm looking and the thing and lo and behold, it has an IR port on the bottom. I got all excited and figured there must be someone out there who has a program for the Palm Pilot to interact with this thing. However, upon further research, Motorola says it's only for factory programming. Anyone want a challenge? This would probably be a great project for any Palm programmer! These things are really cheap and could be a great way to extend the usability of your Palm! Check out the LS350 User Guides on Motorola's site"
An infrared port for factory programming??? (Score:1)
Could just be Motorola not wanting to have to support it?
*shrug*
LS550 has it as well (Score:3)
Government Conspiracy (Score:2)
A REAL hacker would modify their pager to encrypt all data sent/received over the IR port to prevent such a thing from happening!
Hmmm (Score:3)
hmm..interesting (Score:1)
a. diagnostic purposes..you can probably do an entire dump of the memory on the thing through that.
b. programming the id/frequency.
c. durability. an ir port is more durable (and aesthetically pleasing) than a pin-port
try asking someone in a pager shop, and see if you can procure whatever diagnostic tool motorola has for this. Undoubtedly you could call motorola and claim to be a pager shop needing an IR pager programmer...
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
Never, never ever had the id of a page been programmed with crystals. A crystal is the part of the pager which sets the reception frequency, nothing else. Very often you need to change the crystal when changing pager service, because different services use different radio frequencies. In fact there is a huge market for services like changing the crystals.
The id of the pager is stored inside an eeprom in modern pagers (in very old pagers it was just inside an prom and thus not changeable). Probably the ir port can be used for reprogramming this id in the eeprom, but pager used to have some programming contacts, motorola usually hides them behind the battery slide. The service owns a device in which you can put the pager and which interfaces these contacts. This way you can reprogram the id, given that you have a.) the right software and know b.) the password (the firmware of the pager blocks reprogramming otherwise). If you are a virtue with your soldering iron you may unsolder the eeprom and change the id using a programmer but nowadays the eeprom might be integrated into the main controller and thus not be able to programmed seperately.
There is no reason why an ir port should be used for this programming. At least this cannot be the sole reason for the ir port. I guess that its just the same pager as another for a higher price which makes usage out of the ir port. its always the same, different models are of the same hardware (because its cheaper) but features are disabled in software/firmware.
Maybe one of these patents has some information (Score:2)
Patent Information
This pager is manufactured under one or more Motorola U.S. Patents. A
partial listing of these patents is provided on the inside surface of the
battery door. Other patents covering this product are pending.
Note: Patent numbers listed below with an asterisk (*) apply only to the
pager models which utilize the POCSAG protocol
4336524* 4385295* 4412217* 4518961* 4701759* 4755816* 4829466*
4839628* 4851829* 4893271* 4910510* 5073767* 5157391* 5381138*
5247519* 4860003 5051993 5117500 5128665 5168493 5311516
5325088 5371737 5414419 5450071
Re:IR port is for programming, but not much more (Score:1)
IR port is for programming, but not much more (Score:5)
Re:Hmmm (Score:1)
That's true with older pagers, but the newer ones use a PLL (phase locked loop), the crystal only provides a refrence frequancy. It's cheaper to use a PLL since you don't have to replace a part to change the frequancy (just reprogram the pager), and you don't have to use a custom crystal in your design (you can get away with using a common refernce crystal, and use the PLL to tune the pager).
Very few pieces of modern radio equitpment are still tuned with crystals. If fact, when recrystaling services recrystal the newer pagers, they're actuily tuning the pager's PLL to the new frequancy.
tnn.comm.pager (Score:1)
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
Maybe they rated it insiteful because it may have a grain of truth. One could very easily set something up to change the frequency of the pager by merely sending a ir sequence to it. It seems alot easier to me to do that instead of cracking open the case of the pager.
For the matter of having the same case in multple units, that show some merit, but I doubt they'd do that with an IR port. Why would a pager need an IR port except to do something as the above? Maybe if it had a way to send info to other pagers (say transfer pages to a computer too.). Who knows! It just may be what I said was true. Maybe not. Point is you won't be able to tell unless you work in said pager company. I doubt that Motorola will release specs to something such as this.