Pluto firmware modifications

This repository contains tools and documentation to aid in modifying the ADI ADALM Pluto firmware.

Extraction of the Pluto firmware image

This describes how to extract the individual components of the pluto.frm firmware image. It can be useful if only some of the components are going to be modified, since it saves us from having to build the rest from source.

Assuming we have the file pluto.frm in the same directory as the extract_data_dts.py script included in this repository, we can create a directory build to extract the components of the FIT image. This needs dtc, which is often included in a package called device-tree-compiler in Linux distributions.

mkdir build
cd build
dtc -O dts ../pluto.frm | ../extract_data_dts.py /dev/stdin

This will extract the data files inside the FIT image. The filenames of the extracted files are chosen according to the description field in the corresponding node of the FDT tree. The files need to be renamed according to the filenames expected by the pluto.its file.

for file in zynq-pluto*; do mv $file $file.dtb; done
mv FPGA system_top.bit
mv Linux zImage
mv Ramdisk rootfs.cpio.gz

Now we can replace some of these files as required with our modifications, and build the FIT image and .frm file as described in the ADI Wiki. This requires mkimage, which is usually contained in the package uboot-tools in Linux distributions.

cd ..
mkdir new_frm
cd new_frm
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/analogdevicesinc/plutosdr-fw/master/scripts/pluto.its
mkimage -f pluto.its pluto.itb
md5sum pluto.itb | cut -d ' ' -f 1 > pluto.frm.md5
cat pluto.itb pluto.frm.md5 > pluto.frm