Here's hacking at you, Sony

firmware
Repurposing the PS3 Move

Firmware

2011/02/26 02:45
ps3-firmware-update

The goal of my project is develop quadcopter firmware for a university research project. The advantage of the Move is its incredibly low price and its suite of inertial and absolute sensors, all linked together by a reasonably powerful STM32 ARM-Cortex M3 chip. Any new firmware can easily be developed with available tools. Eclipse, Embedded workbench, etc...

This page will be updated with our work, be based on a simple hardware port of the excellent OpenPilot system.

One important facet of the firmware is how to turn on all the various regulators. I’m not sure yet, but it seems that it might be enough to simply enable PD11 (pin 58) on the STM32. This pin is connected to the enable pin on the TI TPS63030 voltage regulator.

Update: Success! Everything went according to theory and plan. I now can run arbitrary code on the Move, and have successfully programmed a small routine that reads all the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer axes. I will someday try to make a short tutorial showing this, but in the meantime feel free to write me and I’ll send you the project files.

Update: I have uploaded sample firmware (see below). You will need at least a Move and a hardware debugger/flasher to make any practical use of it. Without hardware, it is an academic example of how to access the Move’s sensors, buttons, and LEDs. Note that no bluetooth support exists yet.

Original firmware
For whatever reason, Sony chose not to lock its firmware. I actually downloaded it by accident when hooking up my STM32Discovery’s ST-Link debugger. In the resources section, I have included the firmware as read from my Move, as the ability to see how the Move communicates with the BC4 might be invaluable. I’m hoping that someone with more knowledge than I could help me figure out what’s going on. I have already erased and reflashed this firmware, so it is known good.

Resources:
Sony PS3 Move firmware
Simple example firmware
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