MIB STD2 Toolbox: opening up Technisat and Preh car navigation units

What the toolbox is, and the compatibility line it draws

The toolbox is a set of tools for MIB STD2 PQ and ZR Technisat and Preh units, and the README states the compatibility boundary in a warning at the very top. This toolbox version is only compatible with MIB STD2 PQ and ZR Technisat and Preh units and is not compatible with MIB2 STD Delphi and MIB2 HIGH Harman units.

For the MIB2 HIGH platform the README points elsewhere, to the jilleb/mib2-toolbox project, and suggests the Mr-MIBonk M.I.B. More-Incredible-Bash project as an alternative.

The disclaimer section is blunter still: we are not responsible for any damage of your unit, you are doing everything at your own risk, read this README, use your brain and be careful. That is the right register for the project, because what follows involves writing to the flash storage of a device that most people would consider a consumer appliance.

What the toolbox actually does is narrower than the warning implies. It is a shell script payload with a menu system that runs on the unit, and its purpose is to enable the developer mode that the manufacturer left disabled, then give you a file-level view of the unit's filesystem so you can change things and put them back.

The requirements list is short and specific. The unit must be a Train MST2_XX_XX_XX_X0XXXT with X being any character, which identifies the model family, and you find the train press and long hold the MENU button to reach Software Update. You need the Green Engineering Menu, the developer mode, enabled in adaptations of block 5F, and you need an OBD2 adapter with software that can enable it. And you need an empty FAT32 formatted SD card, or soldering skills and a USB flash drive, with enough space for backups, and everything bigger than 1GB is recommended.

The README also points at an FAQ at the bottom of the file and marks it as important.

The installation paths, from an SD card to a virtual machine

The README documents four ways in, and the choice between them depends on what access you have to the unit and how comfortable you are with hardware work.

The first is installation from the SD card in Service Mode, for units with navigation and two SD slots. You unzip the toolbox archive to the root of the SD card, turn on the ignition, insert the card into the SD1 slot, then press and hold the MENU button to open Service Mode and Software Update and install MIBStd2_Online_Approval. Then you open the Green Engineering Menu.

That path has an important exception, and it is the kind of detail that would otherwise be discovered at the wrong moment. SD installation is not possible on units with part numbers 5C0035684F, also known as variant 17222, and 5F003587* or 5QA035874*, also known as variants 47213, 47214, 47215 and 47216. The reason given is that the metainfo2.txt of the Toolbox does not contain these variant numbers, and that metainfo2.txt cannot be edited because it has a digital signature at the end of the file. For those variants the suggestion is to try installing via a USB2HSD cable, and that the only 100 percent working way is connecting a USB SD card reader to the eMMC chip using needles or soldering.

The second path is for units where you already have serial console or telnet access, which requires having installed the toolbox first because console and telnet are disabled by default on all units. You unzip to an SD card or USB drive, delete metainfo2.txt to avoid an endless reading spinner, log in as root with the password root, insert the card, run mount to see where it landed, and then run ksh /media/mp000/install.sh to install the toolbox, with the old GEM automatically updated if found. The mount locations are listed: usually /media/mp000 is slot SD1, /media/mp001 slot SD2, /media/mp002 port USB1 and so on.

The third is the solderless USB2HSD cable method, documented in mibwiki.one.

The fourth is the QNX virtual machine route, which is for people who have an eMMC backup. You unzip to a USB flash drive, make an eMMC dump in raw format with USB Image Tool, convert it to VMDK format, add it to a Neutrino 6.5 virtual machine, insert the toolbox flash drive into the virtual machine, and run the install script from the mount point, which is normally /fs/usb1 or /fs/hd10-dos-1. The README notes that if you hit VM freezes or I/O errors while copying, you can build an ISO from the toolbox contents with AnyToIso Lite, mount it as a CD drive and run ksh /fs/cd0/install.sh instead, or fall back to the eMMC backup method. The reverse conversion at the end is qemu-img convert -f vmdk backup.vmdk -O raw new_backup.img, and the result is flashed back into the eMMC chip.

The dump, customize, backup cycle

Once the toolbox is installed, the workflow for changing anything is three steps, and the README is explicit that it is a cycle rather than a one-off.

The first is to use the dump menu to copy files from the unit's filesystem into the corresponding dump subfolder on the SD card or USB drive. The second is to modify those files as you wish and copy them into the corresponding custom subfolder on the same card. The third is to use the customization menu to copy the modified files back to the unit's filesystem.

What makes that safe is the backup behaviour, and it is stated plainly. Every time you copy files to the unit, the scripts make a backup of the original files to the backup folder on the SD card or USB drive, and at any time later you can use the restore functions to revert changes.

The repository layout reflects that structure exactly. There is a backup/ directory, a cpu/ directory holding the payload that gets installed on the unit, a custom/ directory for your modifications, a dump/ directory for what you pull off the unit, a toolbox/ directory, a tools/ directory, an install.sh script, and metainfo2.txt with the signed file that carries the unit variant information.

The warning on the backup folder is emphatic: do not touch files in the backup folder. That is the one instruction in this project that matters most, because the backup is the only copy of the original that exists if you write something wrong.

There is also a version-dependent wrinkle in the install step. If your firmware is version 01xx or 02xx with GEM version 3.x, you must use a special edition of the toolbox, by replacing the cpu folder in the root of the SD card with the cpu folder from the toolbox/gem folder. If GEM is version 4.x or later, you skip that step.

The menu structure and what the project is made of

The toolbox presents itself as a menu tree, and the tree tells you what the tool covers.

The root is mibstd2_toolbox, and the first branch is about, containing the disclaimer and a history of the toolbox versions. The second is customization, which contains the adaptation section for viewing and changing the unit's adaptation, with sub-entries for the car and device lists.

That structure is the reason to use a toolbox at all rather than a serial terminal. The menu is a set of shell scripts with a text interface, and they wrap the operations you would otherwise do by hand: dumping files, editing them on a computer, writing them back, and restoring if you break something.

The project is MIT licensed with a LICENSE file at the root. The default branch is master, the last push was on 2026-05-14, and the release history is v1.5 from 2026-01-31, v1.4.2 from 2024-07-14 and v1.4.1 from 2024-07-06, with the release titles noting more support, a bug fix release and more buttons and fixes.

The version numbering also tells you something about the audience. This is not a general-purpose tool with a documentation site and an API. It is a payload with a menu, delivered as a zip archive, and the primary documentation is a README written as installation instructions for hardware you may have to open up.

The homepage is a Discord invite link, which tells you where the support happens. There is a code of conduct and contributing file, a GitHub directory for issues, and a licence file, but the community is a chat server rather than a tracker, which is normal for a project of this kind.

Limits: one hardware family, real hardware risk and no undo guarantee

The limits here are the kind that come with the hardware rather than with the code, and they are severe enough to be worth stating in order.

The first is the compatibility line. The toolbox works on MIB STD2 PQ and ZR Technisat and Preh units, and explicitly not on MIB2 STD Delphi and MIB2 HIGH Harman units. There is no way to make it work on the wrong platform, and the README is direct about it. Some unit variants within the supported families also cannot be updated from an SD card at all, because the signed metainfo file that drives the update does not list them.

The second is that this involves writing to embedded flash on a device you may not be able to replace. The eMMC route in particular involves soldering a reader to a chip, making a backup image, and writing a modified image back. If the backup is bad, the unit is a brick. The README's instruction to have enough space for backups, everything bigger than 1GB recommended, is not a formality.

The third is that the safety net is a shell script's copying behaviour. The backup folder is maintained by the install scripts, and the restore functions revert to it. That is a good design, but it is a design, not a guarantee: the scripts can be interrupted, the card can be full, and the restore path assumes the backup was written correctly in the first place.

The fourth is the dependency on enabling developer mode through an OBD2 adapter, which means the software side of the project is only half of it. Getting to the point where you can run the toolbox may require hardware you do not own.

The fifth is the shared runtime assumption. The toolbox scripts run under ksh, the Korn shell, on a QNX-based system, and the install.sh is invoked with ksh explicitly. That is a specific environment and it constrains what the scripts can do and what you can change.

The sixth is documentation depth. The README is thorough about installation and gives the menu tree in outline, but the operations behind each menu entry are not described, so working out what a particular adaptation change does means reading the scripts.

This toolbox against a serial terminal and against a generic firmware modding kit

Two comparisons make the choice clearer.

The first is against using the serial console directly. The toolbox exists partly because console and telnet access is disabled by default on all units, so a pure serial-terminal approach requires getting past that first, which is what the toolbox does. Once you have console access, you can do most of what the toolbox does, and the README's own second installation path assumes you already have it.

What the toolbox adds over raw console access is the menu, the dump and restore cycle, and the fact that it works over a standard SD card without needing a serial cable at all. For the common case of somebody who wants to change one setting and put the unit back, the SD card route is far less risky than soldering a serial adapter.

The second comparison is against a general firmware modding toolkit. Those tend to be broader, aimed at several device families, and they work at a lower level with image manipulation and JTAG. The difference in approach is that this toolbox is specific to one unit family and operates at the filesystem level, through a signed update mechanism and a menu, which means it stays inside what the unit's own update path allows.

That is the trade. A generic toolkit can do more, and can do it on more hardware, and carries more risk when it goes wrong. This one is narrow, mostly reversible, and depends on the manufacturer having left a service mode reachable.

The practical recommendation follows from the README's own structure. Read the FAQ, use the SD card route where the variant numbers allow it, keep the backup card intact, and make one change at a time so that a restore is a single step rather than a bisection.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt the MIB STD2 Toolbox if you own an MIB STD2 PQ or ZR Technisat or Preh head unit and want to change its configuration or firmware files with a recoverable path. Do not attempt it on an MIB2 unit, since the toolbox is not compatible with the MIB2 STD Delphi and MIB2 HIGH Harman platforms, for which other projects exist. Verify first that your unit's part number appears in metainfo2.txt, that you have an SD card and a way to restore what you back up, and that you read the FAQ before touching a backup folder.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: MIT
2. olli991/mib-std2-pq-zr-toolbox on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases