Wrote a review in July 2009. Now I barely use the thing, so I ended up taking it apart. It turned out that people were hacking a similar device, used for video games, for a while. It has a Sunplus SoC on it.

Summary; SLY SL314CM is cel-phone electronics and low-end software repackaged as a multimedia device at a very low price. Inferior results are overshadowed by low price and utility.

A look at the Sly Electronics website should tell you that the company values graphic design. Unfortunately, they are only an importer and rebrander of generic electronics products from China, so, their product merely appear to be well designed. In fact, they are very lightweight, almost feeling like they'll break if handled too much, but, as always, sturdy enough to outlast the warranty.

The SL314CM and LS414CMP are tiny MP3 players that also take photos and videos, record audio, and allow you to read and edit text files.

You can't get this too easily anymore, but there appear to be newer 5MP versions out there.

Now, this being mostly a Linux site, here's the info on compatibility: this player is equally compatible with all platforms. It shows up as a disk on all platforms, and seems to fail to work with iTunes and Windows Media Player. The Listen music player has no mp3 player support. Rhythmbox supports MTP, but I don't know if this gadget does. I read that Rhythmbox supports file-based device management, but can't find that feature.

It looks like the device supports no sync protocol at all. Not MTP, not iTunes, and not SyncML. All it supports is "MSC", which means it shows up on the computer as a hard drive when you plug it in.

Not that this is a bad thing. It prevents you from playing DRM music.

So you'll be dragging files around. Long file names are hard to see on the screen.

The player plays back several formats, but records in 3gp, of 3GPP.org, a cell phone format. Unfortunately, their codec sources aren't GPL, so they aren't included in any of the popular players. Video will play, but audio will not. You can get 3gp support by compiling your video libraries and players from source, and add support for AMR. This AMR issue is the bane of all owners of fancy cell phones trying to integrate with Linux.

Unfortunately, it doesn't support OGG Vorbis. (That one feature would redeem it for Linux heads.)

The camera is a fixed focus lens. The images come out okay, but usually with some color cast due to the lighting. Colors can be corrected on your computer.

Despite all the above negatives, this gadget still manages to cram all these features into a package smaller than a deck of cards, and priced at $50.

You might find this device for a lot less now.

Hacking Information

The USB ID is: 04fc:5560 Sunplus Technology Co., Ltd

Two photos of the opened-up device are attached. The letters on the chips are visible if you use both photos.

The chip in there is Sunplus SPMP3052A-HL171 0836. This thread has some hacking info.

http://www.mp4nation.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=18459

The FRM Pro firmware copier from Sunplus doesn't (yet) work with this device. The latest versions will recognize the existence of the device, but won't talk to it.

To get the device connected correctly, you need to turn it off, push the "esc" button (the "menu" button) and plug it into the USB. The device will show up as a kind of camera, rather than as a usb disk. Install the drivers to allow the device to connect (use the attached driver set).

Also on the board: Samsung K9HBG08U1B (see page
15 of the PDF). According to the document, 8Gb Based 2K Byte/Page W/O Cache, 32Gb QDP 59nm. Package type TSOP1, Org. x8, 3.3V. (This is the flash disk.) One of these days, I'll figure out these acronyms. These specs may help FRM Pro to work. (See: What is NAND flash?, Wikipedia NAND flash.)

Samsung K4S281632E-TC75, a 128Mb SDRAM chip. 3.3V, 8M x 16 bits, 166Mhz, LVTTL interface.

How to update SunPlus SPMP3050

How to download the bin files.

SPMP 3050x hacking page
Another good hacking page.
SPMP downloads

There's a blank spot on the board that reads 1010 5767. This page from SparkFun hints that it might be a space to add a radio reciever.

So, I had a few minutes to kill and looked at the game player filesystems. To do this, download the SPMP3052A firmware and files, attached. This isn't for the SLY, but it has the same CPU. Then you use this (Linux) command to mount the file.

mount -o loop -t vfat AIMG /mnt/AIMG

Sample output:

johnk@johnk-desktop:/mnt/AIMG$ ls
3050ABin0.bin  CONFIG  LOWBAT.JPG  SPMP_25MN1.bin   SPMP_N1_12M.bin  Thumbs.db
CODEPAGE       GAME    RO_RES      SPMP_G1_12M.bin  SPMP_N1.bin

The bin files are probably ARM binaries, so I need a disassember or decompiler to poke around.

My current problem is getting the FRM Pro software to talk to the SLY. I probably need to focus on altering the config file so it'll match the hardware. Then I can read the flash chips and download the images.

More Crap

Manual for an old Sunplus chip programmer. This doesn't have anything for the SPMP305x, but it has some info for older Sunplus chips.