Warning The information on this page hasn't been updated for two years. It is very likely that things don't work like this any longer.
A1 Smart Home Gateway
While looking for cheap motion sensors and other smart home devices, I stumbled upon the A1 Smart Home ecosystem on willhaben. I found a very good offer for two complete starter kits, consisting of
- A1 Smart Home Gateway / A1 Smart Home Premium Gateway
- Foscam IP Camera
- Fibaro Multi Sensor
- Aeotec Gen 5 Door/Window contact
The gateways are completely locked-down and only for use with an A1 smart home subscription. Challenge accepted!
Attaching serial console
Both gateways can be easily opened, the premium gateway has a few screws on the bottom, the “regular” gateway is just clipped together. Once inside, I could quickly identify the serial console header (unpopulated) and identified the pinout. As you can see, pins 2 and 4 are RX/TX (or the other way round). I used a different ground connection because I was unable to solder a pin to the GND connection.
The parameters are 57600 8N1, i.e. standard for a Mediatek chipset.
U-Boot
The bootloader is needed to boot an image from the network. It can be accessed by pressing “4” during bootup. Poking around reveals a few GPIOs and allows to dump the NAND. In fact, most of the time I just pressed “1” to enable TFTP boot.
OpenWrt
Being an OpenWrt enthusiast, I ported OpenWrt to both devices. By looking at the OEM firmware (I dumped the NAND), it wasn't too difficult to come up with the basics:
| Function | Gateway | Premium Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| LAN | OK | OK |
| WiFi | OK | OK |
| ZigBee | OK | OK |
| Z-Wave | OK | OK |
| BLE | no driver | no driver |
| 3G | no module | OK (untested) |
| Flash | OK | OK |
| Buttons | OK | OK |
| LEDs | OK | OK |
The “regular” gateway has a pending pull request at https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/4019, the premium gateway is WiP in my github at https://github.com/andyboeh/openwrt/tree/sercomm_na502s.