I’m at home for Christmas and I’ve found my parents have brought a Philips WAC7500, a fancy hi-fi which has far more features than people would ever need. It can play music from its internal hard drive, iPod/USB, UPnP (via wired or wireless), and radio from either FM or Internet.
So needless to say it is a tad fancy, so I started to play with it and quickly found out it is an embedded Linux running on a ARM processor. You can download a full copy of the software as a firmware update. The firmware is actually a cramfs file system which I was easily able to mount.
mkdir /mnt/wac7500
mount -t cramfs -o loop wac7500_update.bin /mnt/wac7500
I’m going to spend some time trying to hack it apart. So far I’ve found it is running a simple webserver, which allows you to access all you music via a URL such as: http://<ip>/media/
It also has a nvram to store all the settings, and one of those settings is dbg_startsshd which if enabled seems to start a dropbear SSH server. I’ve yet to figure out how to edit nvram or enable the sshd, but I’m sure I will soon.