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Old 11-05-2019, 11:31 AM   #1
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Lightbulb Pocketbook InkPad 3 internals

Surfing the interwebs, got lucky and ran into this post

http://www.lectoreselectronicos.com/...s-del-InkPad-3



The cover with metal shielding on the PCB might serve as wifi antena and also to discourage curious eyes to de-solder it and find out what is hiding inside

I remember that there is an EU website that has the applications of devices for the CE logo or something like that. It has the tear-downs making us a favor, does anyone remember whats the website? I would love to take a look before taking apart mine

The hope is to find a micro or pico sdcard hiding under. Why you ask? better sd card, higher IOps, higher reading/writting speeds (at least to top the USB2 speeds) and thus better better InkPad 3

Al clues are greatly appreciated
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Old 11-07-2019, 01:44 AM   #2
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Pocketbooks are not as easy as kobos to replace the sd card even if there is one present.
If i recall correctly theres some cid trickery involved, browse around theres a thread of people going through the process.
I think inkpad 3 doesnt have a internal slot, but i hope im wrong
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Old 11-08-2019, 06:05 AM   #3
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Got interested in the internals of my Inkpad Pro 3, because reading the license I was presented with accepting data to be transmitted and be used in any way to the like of Pocketbook or just switch of the device. In the light of gdpr I found this quiet disturbing and complained and got no really satisfying answer. So I'm looking forward to understand the data collection mechanisms in my Inkpad to be able to complain officially based on evidence.

Just ordered a Pocketbook Inkpad 3 with broken screen to look at the hardware.

I already looked around some in the system by unpacking the firmware update and trying to reconstruct the filesystem from the contained archives. I guess I found everything beside the uboot binary so far.

There is a very helpful wiki about Allwinner SOCs here: https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page .

They already have a device page for one of the Pocketbook devices and I'd like to see the device page for the Inkpad 3 filled sometimes.

My idea so far is (since I don't want to break open my Inkpad 3 Pro and loose the waterproof feature by doing so) to boot the device from USB, mount the filesystem containing /etc/sudoers, edit it to be able to become root in a e.g. telnet session.
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Old 11-08-2019, 08:09 AM   #4
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interesting indeed

I have had no interest in getting further into the firmware itself, but now that you talk about this, maybe (although I am not well versed) it might be worth the time spent to look in to this.

The fact that the kobo clara HD (with kodo start thingy and koreader) is in my experience faster, specially when compared side by side, despite the inkpad 3 having "better" specs really bugs me, so likely there is (hopefully making it easier to look into) some processes causing overhead.

Oh well. baby steps I guess.
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Old 11-13-2019, 03:21 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sdfgg View Post
The hope is to find a micro or pico sdcard hiding under.
From what I found out you'll only find an soldered on eMMC under the clipped on metal shielding.
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Old 11-13-2019, 07:24 AM   #6
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The Pocketbook Inkpad 3 has an eMMC not micro SD storage device like Kobo Clara.
The Micro SD serves as an external storage rather than the primary one where the operating system is installed.


To adjust the OS (firmware), you will need to use the internal port via USB TTL.
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Last edited by Michal Jancik; 11-13-2019 at 07:29 AM.
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Old 11-13-2019, 07:54 AM   #7
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Originally Posted by Michal Jancik View Post
To adjust the OS (firmware), you will need to use the internal port via USB TTL.
I'm thinking about a way to do that without opening the device. Information about the devices B288 Allwinner soc and Alwinner socs in general can be found here.

There is a page describing FEL mode on Allwinner devices. FEL mode can be used to boot an Allwinner soc devices via USB.

Problem is that I didn't understand the context of the Allwinner BROM as much as to being able to fill out the missing information about supported SOCs.

That information is needed to patch the sunxi-fel tool with informations about to which memory regions the data being needed to boot has to be loaded - well, as far as I understood the process.

My idea would be to make a via usb bootable system for the InkPad 3 that can be used via USB-serial or network, use this system as root to mount and change e.g. /etc/sudoers and obtain by doing so root access to the original device and firmware.

I already have access to a board of a Pocketbook Inkpad 3 via serial connection (which enables access to uboot shell, startup diagnostic and a root shell), but I didn't figure out, yet, how to obtain the missing information about the BROM that is needed to use the sunxi-fel usb boot feature.
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Old 11-14-2019, 07:17 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ChriChri View Post
I'm thinking about a way to do that without opening the device. Information about the devices B288 Allwinner soc and Alwinner socs in general can be found here.

There is a page describing FEL mode on Allwinner devices. FEL mode can be used to boot an Allwinner soc devices via USB.

Problem is that I didn't understand the context of the Allwinner BROM as much as to being able to fill out the missing information about supported SOCs.

That information is needed to patch the sunxi-fel tool with informations about to which memory regions the data being needed to boot has to be loaded - well, as far as I understood the process.

My idea would be to make a via usb bootable system for the InkPad 3 that can be used via USB-serial or network, use this system as root to mount and change e.g. /etc/sudoers and obtain by doing so root access to the original device and firmware.

I already have access to a board of a Pocketbook Inkpad 3 via serial connection (which enables access to uboot shell, startup diagnostic and a root shell), but I didn't figure out, yet, how to obtain the missing information about the BROM that is needed to use the sunxi-fel usb boot feature.
Did you tried this?

https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi...e3d2bd15f1bc0e
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Old 11-14-2019, 07:47 AM   #9
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Originally Posted by kakonema View Post
No, I didn't try it - I even didn't find it! Thanks a lot that's exactly what I've been looking for!

What a shame that the pull request isn't commited because the reviewer and the original author are not willing to put it a way they can both live with...

I'll get back when I tried...
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Old 11-14-2019, 04:21 PM   #10
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Originally Posted by ChriChri View Post
I'll get back when I tried...
Yep, it seems to work:

Code:
./sunxi-fel -l
USB device 001:019   Allwinner B288    93000000:44004624:50428714:5030080b
./sunxi-fel version
AWUSBFEX soc=00001699(B288) 00000001 ver=0001 44 08 scratchpad=00007e00 00000000 00000000
I forked the source and included the patches contained in the original pull request here: https://github.com/chri2/sunxi-tools.git

Now I'll have to learn how to test it and how to use it...
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Old 11-22-2019, 10:12 AM   #11
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@ChriChri How did you trigger FEL mode?
Did you make any further progress?

Last edited by Markismus; 11-22-2019 at 10:18 AM.
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Old 11-23-2019, 02:37 PM   #12
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@ChriChri How did you trigger FEL mode?
Did you make any further progress?
I need to take a break from looking into it, because I have to take care of other things (but I'll continue when time comes ;-) ).

To get into FEL mode I did the following:

- connected to my computer (linux) via usb
- pushed and hold power button (the one with the led) until device vanished from usb (reading dmesg) to make sure it is really switched off
- hold home button (the button all to the left below the display) and hit power button once to switch on
- in dmesg there should appear a different device (mine: idVendor=1f3a, idProduct=efe8, bcdDevice= 2.b3)
- FEL mode

Recompiling my sunxi-tools with the patched source mentioned here got me - what looks for me - valid answers from the device.

I extracted boot0 eGON from my devices eMMC image and tried to upload it using sunxi-fel and got corresponding messages in the serial console of my test board.

I found out the sunxi-package format that is used for the .uboot-file contained in the firmware package by pocketbook. It contains sections for u-boot, soc-cfg oder dtb. I guess it could be possible to extract informations needed to build a u-boot from scratch. There is also information on the sunxi-wiki on how to get informations.

Then I got stuck - cause: lack of knowledge . Didn't know how to get a file containing SDL and uboot to upload to the device.

I decided to stop at this point and start again later with starting a device page for the board as proposed in the sunxi wiki. My hope would be to learn while doing so as much as I need to make a system boot via FEL/usb (hopefully with the help of the sunxi community).
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Old 11-29-2019, 09:10 PM   #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ChriChri View Post
I need to take a break from looking into it, because I have to take care of other things (but I'll continue when time comes ;-) ).

To get into FEL mode I did the following:

- connected to my computer (linux) via usb
- pushed and hold power button (the one with the led) until device vanished from usb (reading dmesg) to make sure it is really switched off
- hold home button (the button all to the left below the display) and hit power button once to switch on
- in dmesg there should appear a different device (mine: idVendor=1f3a, idProduct=efe8, bcdDevice= 2.b3)
- FEL mode

Recompiling my sunxi-tools with the patched source mentioned here got me - what looks for me - valid answers from the device.

I extracted boot0 eGON from my devices eMMC image and tried to upload it using sunxi-fel and got corresponding messages in the serial console of my test board.

I found out the sunxi-package format that is used for the .uboot-file contained in the firmware package by pocketbook. It contains sections for u-boot, soc-cfg oder dtb. I guess it could be possible to extract informations needed to build a u-boot from scratch. There is also information on the sunxi-wiki on how to get informations.

Then I got stuck - cause: lack of knowledge . Didn't know how to get a file containing SDL and uboot to upload to the device.

I decided to stop at this point and start again later with starting a device page for the board as proposed in the sunxi wiki. My hope would be to learn while doing so as much as I need to make a system boot via FEL/usb (hopefully with the help of the sunxi community).
There are multiple issues with old sunxi-tools tutorials because the eGON format (version 4.0) has changed. The sunxi-package stuff is parsed by allwinner's modified uboot in lieu of its own classic dtb.

That makes going through that route a bit awkward. I've managed to fire this "native" uboot up by just burning it to memory via fel write/exec (turns out you don't need egon SPL on newer allwinners, as by the time you get to fel, DRAM is already configured, no more 32k sram limit).

Most crucially, it's possible to fire swupdate binary this way (and debrick your device if you seriously hose mmc0).
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Old 12-05-2019, 05:02 PM   #14
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Originally Posted by ezdiy View Post
There are multiple issues with old sunxi-tools tutorials because the eGON format (version 4.0) has changed. The sunxi-package stuff is parsed by allwinner's modified uboot in lieu of its own classic dtb.

That makes going through that route a bit awkward. I've managed to fire this "native" uboot up by just burning it to memory via fel write/exec (turns out you don't need egon SPL on newer allwinners, as by the time you get to fel, DRAM is already configured, no more 32k sram limit).

Most crucially, it's possible to fire swupdate binary this way (and debrick your device if you seriously hose mmc0).
Yes, I already saw that sunxi-tool cannot parse the eGON 4.0. Thanks for the information about the idea behind the sunxi-package - I guess the parsing is not contained in u-boot mainlaine. I think I found the dtb inside the sunxi-package.

The fact that a lot of the stuff in sunxi-wiki about getting the information for a device page is not correct anymore made me think a good start to get support by the sunxi community would be to ask the questions about the missing parts of a new device page - at least it would be an attempt following the expected path of getting hold of a new device.

Could you provide your command lines to start uboot via fel/usb? Also the commands to run swupdate and - if you already know how to use it - how to use it would be great.

I'd like to try it on my testing board once I get around to it again.
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Old 12-12-2019, 06:27 PM   #15
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Sorry, not posting about fel / uboot / sunxi-package

I have put together a script to pull apart an emmc dump from the 740, into individual memory regions.
https://github.com/mchubby/pb740-inkpad-notes

Weeee~ nice graph: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mc...ion-layout.png
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