Major bugfix release of SIMtrace firmware
At the CCC Camp 2011, the Osmocom SIMtrace project was a major success. Not only were something like 60 units out of our initial batch of 100 units sold, but the SIMtrace workshop was so successful that it had to be held three times instead of once.
During the workshop we discovered a very annoying bug which I wasn't able to solve immediately. Depending on the combination of phone/simcard used, the SIMtrace would disconnect from USB and the phone would claim there is no SIM card inserted.
The debugging went like this:
- SIMtrace was resetting very early in/after the ATR
- the reset reason was diagnosed as being a watchdog reset
- the watchdog was triggered by an IRQ storm from the USART
- the IRQ storm was caused by the firmware not clearing some parity error / overrun related bits
However, at that point I couldn't further find the cause of the bug. I assumed it was related to the PPS/PTS, but couldn't really point my finger at it. If we sniff the PPS/PTS wrong, then of course our baud rate is different from the real baud rate, which in turn would cause perceived parity errors and the like.
I'm grateful that most people still didn't loose their interest in simtrace and happily bought the unit and/or attended the workshop.
After a bit more debugging after the camp, I have now solved the bug. I simply never realized that the TCK (ATR checksum byte) is only present in cards that support T=1 as well as T=0. However, some simpler SIM cards like the ones that we issued for our test GSM network on the camp only do T=0 and thus don't transmit TCK.
The old code thus considered the first PTS/PPS byte (0xff) as the TCK, and didn't recognize the PTS/PPS correctly.
Firmware version v0.2 fixes this problem. I've released the firmware update, now also available from the wiki