Buddha machine teardown with flash dump

This is one of many devices on eBay sold as buddhist meditation aids.

They generally have a large number of well-compressed audio files that loop to provide an ambience that will help achieve the state of ultimate-shamoo whereby they may drink holy-beer and party. (My understanding of religion may not be accurate.)

When I took another more glorious solar powered unit apart in a different video I was asked if I could dump the flash memory chip to see if it could be repurposed with alternative music files.

Keep in mind that the memory is just 16 Mbit, equating to 2 Megabytes of 8 bit memory, which is only enough for 2 minutes of decent quality MP3 music. That's just enough for random fart noises or a Rickroll.

The unit may possibly use an ordinary MP3 player chip like a gpd2856a or it may have a microcontroller with proprietary software and some form of file protection for the music on the chip.

Here's a link to a dump of the flash contents if you wish to try and solve the puzzle of the data format. http://www.bigclive.com/buddha.bin

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