Motorola Vip2262

[Clidia Panahon]

Youmay notice that some of the VIP2250 boxes carry the Motorola logo, which newer versions are Arris branded. The reason for these discrepancies is because Motorola Home division was acquired by Arris.

In the center of the unit is a bank of 3 status LEDs (link, HD, and record). Just to the right of the record LED is the IR receiver. If you are using an IR extender with this box you should place the infrared transmitter near this location.

The main chip on the board is the Broadcom BCM7405DFKFEBB01G. The BCM7405 is a complete IP DVR system on a chip. The chip has an onboard DDR2 memory controller and support for two SATA-2 storage interfaces.

Since this serial port could provide access to the boot loader I sought out to determine if it was an active port. I found a very useful guide to reverse engineering serial ports which assisted in the process of determining the pinout and other characteristics.

Using continuity mode on the meter I started searching for ground pins by connecting one lead to the chassis and probing each pin one at a time. I found that pins 1 and 5 were directly connected to ground.

Next I switched my meter into DC voltage mode and started searching for VCC. With one lead of the meter on ground I probed each of the pins. Pins 2 and 3 measured +3.3 volts, making each a possible candidate for VCC. Although each of them could also be the TX pin.

In TTL serial TX is constant at VCC (logic high) is pulled low for a 0 (logic low). Pin 4 measured 0 volts which lead me to believe this was probably the RX pin. At this point I had enough information to start testing.

This means that in order to connect an RS232 serial port to the TTL serial port on the VIp2250 an adapter must be used. I already had a RS-232 to TTL adapter on hand that I bought from TCNISO a long time a go.

These adapters are fairly easy to build but the easiest solution is a prebuilt MAX232. Broadcom actually provides a schematic diagram for a UART serial adapter circuit that uses the MAX3232CSE chip in the BCM97405 schematic (page 23).

The serial output shows that when the box initializes it starts the BCM97405B1_B2 Motorola 1st stage boot loader. The motorola boot loader then starts the Microsoft IPTV boot loader which then starts the Windows CE operating system.

The VIP2250 contains a 500GB Seagate SATA hard drive (model ST3500414cs). This drive provides about 170 hours of HD video storage. This drive was designed specifically for video storage and runs very cool and quiet.

The hard drive contains 2 small FAT16 partitions, and one large FAT32 partition. I was able to successfully mount all of the partitions on a Linux system and examine the files. Since the partitions are formatted with FAT the drive can also be accessed using Windows.

The largest partition contains many 1GB SLC files which are used for video storage. These SLC files appear to function as filesystem on top of a filesystem (Probably providing encrypted storage for the video).

Upgrading to a 1TB drive will increase the HD video storage capacity from 170 hours to about 380 hours. I would recommend using a hard drive specifically designed for DVR usage such as the 1TB Western Digital AV-GP drive.

The contents of these image files can be extracted using nkbintools and CreateDump.bat. To extract the contents of nk.bin place the file in a directory where you have extracted the contents of nkbintools.zip. Place the CreateDump.bat batch in the same directory. Then run the CreateDump.bat file from a command prompt. If the extraction was successful the contents will be extracted to a new folder called dump.

Inside the nk.bin image file there are 3 main registry files, boot.hv, default.hv and user.hv. The HVEdit utility can be used to decode the hive files into text files (.hvm) which can be modified and then converted back to .hv format.

Broadcom provides a full reference design platform based on the BCM7405 chip which they identify as the BCM97405. The BCM97405 is a fully functional set top box that exposes all of the different input/output ports provided by the chip.

I suspect these are provides to hardware manufacturers to assist in designing their own platform based on the BCM7405 SOC. These boxes are probably also useful for software developers writing code to run on this platform.

Hi can you tell me if I purchase a DVR box used by At&t or any other program supplier can I record on them? I currently have an antenna which gets me several channels but I want to be able to record some of my shows. thank you for your assistance

No, the DVR units provided by the cable companies will only record content from their networks. In your case you would be looking for a stand alone DVR. You might want to take a look at the Channel Master DVR system, it may work for you.

I just upgraded the home theater receiver from an LG to the Samsung ht-j5500. Now with digital and surround, I get a popping sound when changing channels. Does the VIP2250 have a service menu I can change the audio output from?

Can you use an external eSATA drive on the Arris box to increase the storage of DVR? I have an eSATA 1 TB Western Digital PN: WDBABT0010HBK-00 / If not do you know of any external drives I can use to boost the storage capacity of the DVR?

I own an UHD TV UE55TU8072UXXH with the Samsung universal smart remote. I was able to change channels directly with the Samsung smart remote controlling my cable box (tv box) model Arris (Motorola) VIP1002ESL , tv provider is T-mobile (T-com).

Hello all, i finally solved my problem selecting cable model motorola (arris) VIP1200 instead of motorola (arris) VIP1002ESL (the one i currently own). Very strange but i could pass the channel change test with the samsung universal remote and i can control again my cable box with it. Have a nice week-end.

Same problem with arres vip5662w. Was working then stopped. I thought it was my remote. Bought a new Samsung remote. Still same problem. Something from the last update must have messed up the remote to control my device.

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