Samsung NX Opensource files re-uploaded

Hi!

I made an inquiry at Samsung Opensources, they just re-uploaded the following files: NX30, NX3000, NX300, NX300M and NX2000. NX1 files are still available too.

For those who want to develop mods, it's a perfect opportunity to get the files, as they will be unloaded soon, following Samsung's EOL schedule. It's always possible to ask for a re-uploaded, but it takes a while for them to reply the inquiry. So even if you don't want to use it right now, it's a good thing to keep it saved in your files.

Right now I'm working on NX30 files, I'll try to make a custom firmware to enable some features like telnet, ftp and autobackup, those are already available for NX300 and NX2000 by the users/developers Otto, ge0rg, ajavamind and others, I'll try to bring them to the NX30.

Also I'm working on NX Mini body, I'm trying to make a hotshoe adapter for it, unfortunately it's nearly impossible to get some kind of high speed sync, but it's still a nice feature to have. I'll make a tutorial for it as soon as I get it working properly.

I'll be opening GitHub repositories to explain everything and update the post, for those who wish to follow the progress and/or contribute with the project.

That's it for now. Have a nice weekend and keep creative.

StenM wrote:

hunkreborn wrote:

Hi!

I made an inquiry at Samsung Opensources, they just re-uploaded the following files: NX30, NX3000, NX300, NX300M and NX2000. NX1 files are still available too.

Lunar New Year Holiday in Korea -- 12-bit RAW video mod for NX1?

https://opensource.samsung.com/uploadSearch?searchValue=nx1

Yeah I was very surprised to get a reply during the holidays! 
Well... I would accept a NX1 donation to check this... So... Maybe? 

NX1 and NX500 are extremely rare here in Brazil.

Funny thing, I paid something like US$30,00 for my now-dead-NX2000, US$50,00 for both of mine NX Minies and US$80,00 for a pack of 4 dead NX30 bodies. Fixed 2 of them already. 
The only NX500 that I could find in 2 years, was listed at US$300,00 with a dead LCD. Nonsense. There is one NX1 listed right now, but its something like US$1000,00, its a deal since comes with 4 lenses, 2 batteries, grip and speedlite... But its too much to me.
I'll wait a donation

Piet22 wrote:

hunkreborn wrote:

US$80,00 for a pack of 4 dead NX30 bodies. Fixed 2 of them already.

I also have a dead NX30.

How did you repair the 2 dead NX30's? Was there a common problem?

Thanks for replying, regards Piet

Well, I bought the service manual in samsungparts.com (they suck by the way, as you HAVE TO PAY  for shipping and WAIT for a CD containing the manual!!! A 30mb PDF! it ended being something like US$40,00 and a 7 day wait) I had to check each component in the board that could make the body become dead, one of them had a problem in the power line, I found 3 dead SMD caps, after I replaced them and the camera simply worked, but it still broken as it wont charge from USB. Not a real problem to me, so I didn't bother to risk making it worse by trying to fix this, probably the charging IC is dead. Its microscopic and really hard to replace, so... This is the one that I kept with me.

The one that I sold had a real simple problem, the board that handles all the cap charging for the in-body flash system was toasted, the cap was blown. This one had a real new body, like really brand-new! I just swapped the board using parts from another NX30 and it worked like new. As it was 100% functioning, I sold it to recover the invested money.

Do you have a clue about the problem in your NX30? If it doesn't turns on, check the flash-cap board, its beneath the palm rest. Be extra careful, to remove the palm rest you must remove 2 screws hidden behind the main board and one in the bottom of the camera. The command board connects to it using a really weak flex cable. I say this because I broke the first one that I tried to teardown before the service manual arrived.

Check for extra-heated elements in the board also, usually components that heat a lot in a small window of time are the cause for dead boards.

I still have 2 boards to play with, I'll try to fix another one, but there is one that I'm pretty sure its a lost cause because the ram chip is frying withing seconds. Unfortunately neither I have the equips and experience to replace BGA chips, nor I have a ram module that fits the camera. Usually I would remove it from a DDR2 Ram, but all of which that I have are rectangular shaped mem chips, Samsung NX uses a square one. So... Paper weight!

Anyway, good look trying to fix it. Its not really hard, it just requires a lot (I mean a LOT) of time and testing stuff. After a while it becomes really intuitive. And be really gentle with the flex cables, I think Samsung NX's flex cables are the weakest that I've ever worked with!

Piet22 wrote:

Thanks for you reply.

How do you diagnose a capacitor as being defective? A resistance measurent while the capacitor is still on the PCB or is it necessary to desolder the capacitor for a capacitance measurement?

And if it is defective, how do you know the capacitance of the replacement capacitor?

Regards Piet

At first I check for caps that are shorted to ground, to make things easy, I soldered one of the probes to a ground pad and started checking every single cap in the board, marking them with a permanent marker to make sure that I'm not double checking them. I never had trouble with a caps that aren't at their nominal value, but if it was the case, I guess you would have to remove them to check outside the board. Short caps create a whole problem in the board, I think that a bad value would make things get a little strange at first, like shutting off or creating extra heat, but I guess it would not prevent the camera to power on.

In many of the times that I was able to successfully fix cameras and other devices, the problem was solved just by replacing a shorted cap. Things get a little complicated once you checked everything and nothing is shorted. Means that the problem is elsewhere and it can be literally anything... In that case I would start by checking PMIC. Samsung NX30 uses a MAX8682, there are a lot of resistors and some fuses that you can check around it. You may also want to check the MOSFETs near this PMIC, none of my cameras had problem with it, but there are a lot of Samsung's products that use that same MOSFET and they are a common problem among them.

As for the value and detail of the components, they're in the manual. Sadly I don't think I'm legally allowed to "give" the manual...

Piet22 wrote:

hunkreborn wrote:

As for the value and detail of the components, they're in the manual. Sadly I don't think I'm legally allowed to "give" the manual...

I also have a copy of the NX30 Service Manual but mine only has part numbers and no replacement info.

Strange... It does not look like NX30 main board.

I'm making macro pictures of the board, it's not ready yet. I think I'll be able to do it by Friday or Saturday.

I'll try to add the caps value and IC partnumbers in a overlay.

snaums wrote:

Hi.

First of, thank you for requesting these files again. Gives me a chance to look into the NX300, which I foolishly did not request last year (or did not save).

Anyway. I was trying to build the NX300m firmware, but apparently used the wrong compiler and bricked my camera. I found the SBS in the nx300m package to be broken; it had obvious errors in it, but also seemed to lock up when attempting to use its shell. So I tried to reverse engineer the procees and screwed up a bit.

Instead of the recommended codesourcery compiler I used the arm-linux-gnueabihf from Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit. And instead of using the pre-built bootloader images I build them myself, making every recovery attempt futile.

Has anyone built a firmware using this package (recently) and can give me some insight into how to create a working firmware image? Help would be appreciated.

Regards,
snaums

Hi! You're welcome!

I did the same thing back in 2020, I ended up bricking my NX2000 as well... After that incident I bought a NX300m, and I was able to make a simple but working custom firmware following every single step listed in NX Crypto's tutorial in https://sites.google.com/site/nxcryptophotography/diy-firmware

Its a rather boring and slow process, compared to Samsung's "HOW_TO_BUILD.TXT" method, but it works!
What differs one from another is that he checks each metadata value and makes sure that matches the original Samsung's nx300m.bin firmware file.

Later on he mounts the UBI partition and makes all the changes he want in the platform.img and then recompiles it. In the end he checks all the metadata once more, to make sure that the checksum is matching.

All I did in my "version" was making the NX300m always connected to WLAN automatically, that way I was always able to livestream in my computer without using the built in remote viewfinder function in the camera. The problem with remote viewfinder is that it only allows you to connect when using a AF NX Lens, and I wanted to be able to use my vintage lenses.

It was a simple mod, I was very apprehensive since I killed my NX2000 in a previous attempt to mod it. Fortunately, in NX300m you're able to enter dev hidden menu and make some changes that don't require a custom FW, like allowing to shoot without lens and remove the video length cap. In NX2000 you don't have that option, as it has almost no buttons to perform the "Konami Code" and enter dev mode.

Funny thing tho, by using Telnet and changing a few values with prefman, I was able to make the NX2000 shoot 1080p60, the camera only allows you to use 720p60 or 1080p30 by default, I wonder why Samsung made this limit if it was fully capable.

Cheers!

Piet22 wrote:

hunkreborn wrote:

Strange... It does not look like NX30 main board.

Thats right, it is the flash-cap or strobo pcb board beneath te palmrest as you suggested to start the diagnosis with. Page 54 on the service manual.

I also have service manuals of NX300, NX500 and NX1. If you require one, send me a pm with your email adress. They are handy for disassembly instructions but they only contain parts lists of complete assemblies and not of the electronic components.

Oh I see! Yes, the manual is very poor, it only details every component in the main board.

And thanks for the offer! Right at this moment I dont need them, I wish I could get my hands in a NX500 or NX1, but its really rare here in Brazil. When they arrived at the market here, Samsung was already killing the system.

About your NX30, what are the symptoms? Is it able to charge the battery? I was trying to fix another body that charges the battery, but when I try to turn it on the green led turns on, then it blinks once, and turns green again, its like a loop. I was checking the board, I was able to find a shorted mosfet by using alcohol to see if any component gets extra hot in a strange way. I'll try to replace it later.

Have a nice day!

Great to see people trying to get more out of this great but sadly unsupported system.

Wish you the best in your endevours. Please keep us updated with your progress.

Hey,

it's great to see that we got back access to the Open Source files. As the cameras are all "Hybrid DSC", you can search for "hybrid" to get them all listed:

https://opensource.samsung.com/uploadSearch?searchValue=hybrid

Unfortunately, there is no source for the NX mini / NX 3000. I've also downloaded all the tarballs and all the NX camera firmware files (all fourteen from NX10 to NX500), and did some analysis of what's under the hood:

https://github.com/ge0rg/samsung-nx-hacks#device-support

The firmware files for NX 3000 and NX mini are very similar (both around 130MB uncompressed, both have similar names that are different from the other ones), and I just can't find out what's inside. 130MB is large enough to be Linux-based, and they came after the NX300, so it would be quite logical, but the image does not have the same headers as NX300, and it seems to be using some weird run-length-encoding or something else that garbles all the interesting strings.

Just to pick one example, this is a hex dump of a single string that should read like "D:/SW2/jklee3/msn/nxf1_src/mem_mgr.c":

```
00000000: 0000 443a 2f53 5732 2f6a 6b6c 6565 332f ..D:/SW2/jklee3/
00000010: 6d73 0284 6e2f 6e78 6631 0005 5f00 0673 ms..n/nxf1.._..s
00000020: 7263 2f24 202f 6d02 9065 6d5f 6d67 7201 rc/$ /m..em_mgr.
00000030: 105f 040c 2e63 0a ._...c.
```

There is 0x00 0x00 followed by sixteen characters, then there are two bytes (0x02 0x84) before the next block, but that's only six chars, etc.

I'd love to be able to unpack that and to understand which OS this tiny beast is running.

P.S: I'm back into the game after I got myself a second NX500, realized how awesome the nx-remote-controller-mod is (I never tested it because there was no screenshot), and finally ported dropbear and sftp-server to be able to download image files in a more secure way.

ge0rg wrote:

Hey,

it's great to see that we got back access to the Open Source files. As the cameras are all "Hybrid DSC", you can search for "hybrid" to get them all listed:

https://opensource.samsung.com/uploadSearch?searchValue=hybrid

Unfortunately, there is no source for the NX mini / NX 3000. I've also downloaded all the tarballs and all the NX camera firmware files (all fourteen from NX10 to NX500), and did some analysis of what's under the hood:

https://github.com/ge0rg/samsung-nx-hacks#device-support

The firmware files for NX 3000 and NX mini are very similar (both around 130MB uncompressed, both have similar names that are different from the other ones), and I just can't find out what's inside. 130MB is large enough to be Linux-based, and they came after the NX300, so it would be quite logical, but the image does not have the same headers as NX300, and it seems to be using some weird run-length-encoding or something else that garbles all the interesting strings.

Just to pick one example, this is a hex dump of a single string that should read like "D:/SW2/jklee3/msn/nxf1_src/mem_mgr.c":

```
00000000: 0000 443a 2f53 5732 2f6a 6b6c 6565 332f ..D:/SW2/jklee3/
00000010: 6d73 0284 6e2f 6e78 6631 0005 5f00 0673 ms..n/nxf1.._..s
00000020: 7263 2f24 202f 6d02 9065 6d5f 6d67 7201 rc/$ /m..em_mgr.
00000030: 105f 040c 2e63 0a ._...c.
```

There is 0x00 0x00 followed by sixteen characters, then there are two bytes (0x02 0x84) before the next block, but that's only six chars, etc.

I'd love to be able to unpack that and to understand which OS this tiny beast is running.

P.S: I'm back into the game after I got myself a second NX500, realized how awesome the nx-remote-controller-mod is (I never tested it because there was no screenshot), and finally ported dropbear and sftp-server to be able to download image files in a more secure way.

I didn't see the NX500.../nt

Unfortunately, Samsung can't provide anything for the 3000/3300/mini. They just responded to my OSS request as follows:

NX3000 is a model released about 8 years ago.

Unfortunately, since it has been a long time, please understand that it is difficult for the development team that developed the project to handle your request.

We are sorry that there is nothing we can provide other than the information below that is currently posted.
https://opensource.samsung.com/uploadSearch?searchValue=NX3000

The info file listed there only mentions BSD, SSLeay, and Apache licenses, so it looks like there is no obligation to publish source code.

I'm still struggling to understand the firmware structure and the components of this series, and I'd love to be able to change the firmware (so that I can replace the URLs of the Samsung services with my own).

Thank you.

ge0rg wrote:

Unfortunately, Samsung can't provide anything for the 3000/3300/mini. They just responded to my OSS request as follows:

NX3000 is a model released about 8 years ago.

Unfortunately, since it has been a long time, please understand that it is difficult for the development team that developed the project to handle your request.

We are sorry that there is nothing we can provide other than the information below that is currently posted.
https://opensource.samsung.com/uploadSearch?searchValue=NX3000

The info file listed there only mentions BSD, SSLeay, and Apache licenses, so it looks like there is no obligation to publish source code.

I'm still struggling to understand the firmware structure and the components of this series, and I'd love to be able to change the firmware (so that I can replace the URLs of the Samsung services with my own).

if it's Linux (not BSD), then (as I understand it) the linux part has to use

"the GNU General Public License (GPL)"

I just came across this so haven't had a chance to look at it...

"ottokiksmaler/nx500_nx1_modding"

"These cameras run a full blown Linux distribution (Tizen) with shell, X, networking stack, debugging and testing tools - the works."

https://github.com/ottokiksmaler/nx500_nx1_modding#:~:text=These%20cameras%20run%20a%20full,and%20testing%20tools%20-%20the%20works.

Hi, not all NX cameras run on Linux, my findings are only for NX500 (but do apply to other, but not all, models).