User:Bmc
From The Neuros Technology Wiki
BMC 
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|---|---|
| Other Names: | Brian |
| Where to Find: | Neuros GoogleGroup + Neuros Forums |
| Areas of Expertise: | Embedded Development |
| Secondary Expertise: | Machine Learning |
| Member Since: | 2009 |
| Group Membership: | |
| Accomplishments: | OSDng |
| Primary Products: | OSD |
| Other Communities: | |
| Location: | California |
| Website: | http://osd.oddren.com |
I'm a tinkerer by nature, and am a proponent of open-source/open-hardware platforms. I've played with openwrt, rockbox, OLPC, and such in the past. For a previous job I focused on embedded work on a variety of platforms. I'm still pretty comfortable around embedded development despite having not done it professionally for a while.
Why OSDng?
I had some ancient VHS tapes to transfer, and had had unpleasant results in the past with USB dongle software/hardware encoders (unstable drivers, OS dependencies, sync issues, etc.), and wanted an external device that just did it all independent of my computer. I also independently wanted a networkable music server for the living room. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and grab an OSD.
I also considered the Roku and the popcornhour, but I figured it'd be more fun to have a open platform that I could use for other things in the future, even if the latest firmware had some rough spots based on a quick perusal of the wiki and forums.
I picked up an OSD1.0 from eBay in May 2009. I immediately updated to the latest firmware (Arizona); I was a little shocked at how rough some of the rough spots were for what I was trying to do, but quickly set things right for my purposes.
In the spirit of contributing back to the open source community, I invested a little more time and made sure my improvements were packaged up and usable by others.
As the Neuros LLC development and new firmware seemed somewhat dormant when I joined, I then took it a little further, and put everything together into the "last upk", which bootstraps your OSD into "OSDng" - which lives entirely on external media (no more fiddling with 16M or 128M space constraints), and makes the entire OSD root filesystem user-modifiable (no more monolithic UPK updates), and makes it easy to recover from "bricking" changes you might make (just remove/reset your root-rw loopback file).
Happy OSD tinkering, everyone...
