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• Log entry #4 USB and Power

  Dream1iner • 08/21/2026 at 21:42 • 0 comments

  What can I say, USB is not easy.

  As a bonus - if you need your own set of ID's - you need to pay annual fee of 3k USD.
  At the end of the day I was able to get to stable 7.2-74 MB/s for write and around 10.2 MB/s for read.
  
  There are few power rails that I have no idea about, they appear to be not that important from what I can understand, but working with them crashes device.
  
  Other then that, I got around power and should get better results then stock OS, mostly because of SD card

• Log entry #3 Fully ready Bootloader

  Dream1iner • 08/04/2026 at 17:48 • 0 comments

  Few more days, dozens of tests, couple more features.

  BL is fully ready, tested and it's time to work on App itself 

• Log entry #2 - Bootloader

  Dream1iner • 07/30/2026 at 23:29 • 0 comments

  I think bootloader is ready.

  For the past 2 weeks that's third time I think this way, but this time I think it's actually 90% done and no significant changes are expected.
  
  BL is different from ipodLinux and Rockbox, so I've added Recovery Menu, something familiar to Android users. 
  Should be helpful if things go sideways.
  I've crashed my BL on purpose just to see how easy can I restore it and having recovery menu helps a lot.

  There won't be dual OS support, since I hate when ipod decides to go with original OS and then it takes minutes if you have big music library + not having original OS and dual boot option damaged partition couple of times, so yes, no dual boot.

  One thing that I always wanted to have is auto DFU - but I was not able to achieve that safely.
  Since I will build separate flashing tool, I decided to not proceed with auto DFU, at least for now.

• Log entry #1 - What I want it and why I am doing this

  Dream1iner • 07/29/2026 at 21:14 • 0 comments

  Hi all.

  Those who are in ipod/rockbox/theming community might or might not remember me as author of NeoBeat or first adaptive Ipod classic theme for Rockbox or animations and some other things.

  I decided to work on something different - I want to bring FreeRTOS to iPod.

  Why? I am tired and bored with Rockbox, it was good 20+ years but I just don't want to deal with it anymore. Especially UI "API" (Viewports and all that) it's just a torture if you want to do something more advanced than 2 rounded rectangles on the screen.

  What is FreeRTOS and why I decided to go with it?

  RTOS designed to run even on microcontrollers with extremely tight hardware limitations, so iPod should be able to run it with no issues.

  + there is LVGL and this fact alone is enough for me.

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