rtcwake on Kobo?

[sunda]

Originally Posted by z000ao8q

Hello,

you need a tweaked version of the rtcwake command.
I still need to post it here. hope that I can do it today or tomorrow...

Ok, great! waiting then.
(please add with instructions for the tweaked version, I'm new in Linux and Kobo)

[z000ao8q]

Hello,
here you go:
http://www.scherello.de/rtcwake_kobo.zip
unzip into your kobo-sd-card and use it as mentioned in the thread. e.g.:

/mnt/onboard/busybox_kobo rtcwake -u -s 30 -m mem

[sunda]

Originally Posted by z000ao8q

Hello,
here you go:
http://www.scherello.de/rtcwake_kobo.zip
unzip into your kobo-sd-card and use it as mentioned in the thread. e.g.:

Thanks for the file, now the call works!

[sunda]

Anyone knowing how to call/set Kobo in "low power mode"?

I made a measurement, to see how much current actually is used:
I noticed that the kobo after startup and going to main nickel, if nothing is pressed, it uses around 13mA. And if you wait around 10sec. it reaches goes to some "low power mode" and only uses 2mA!!! (same use when it goes standby actuall, 6 time less power use).

I KoboLauncher (sergeyvl12) and Wheather (KevinShort), great work by the way, the current use is 13mA like in nickel.
Idea was to combine this function (z000ao8q) to save even more power in Weather, so it goes to 2mA.

Any ideas or script call to set the CPU in this "sleep mode"?

[z000ao8q]

hello,

how did you measure the power consumption?
i tried it with my digital meter directly at the battery, but the internal resistance of the meter was too high to get the kobo booted.
...how did you proceed?

[sunda]

I got the same problem at the beginning, but by changing the measurement range on my meter it worked (there is a high current withdraw during booth). Are you good in C? I found these (c code) from regading the chip, question is how to use them and put the system in this "sleep" mode. ....

[DonTomme]

Hi folks, i hope that thread is still being watched.

I am trying to use a Kobo Mini (bought in 10/2013) as a weather display just like z000ao8q does/did.
I used his guide for configuring after hacking it according to the mobileread wiki. Finally I got everything to work fine except waking the Kobo Mini up from sleep mode.
Before asking my actual question I would like to point out some problems I had (some of them did not seem to occur on older versions). Maybe that could help to find a solution for my problem:

• The applets crond and crontab were not available in the shipped busybox so I used a precompiled full version for that (replacing the original busybox did not work, so I keep both binaries)
• rtcwake said that the device /dev/rtc0 was not enabled for wakeup events. I tried z000ao8qs tweaked version of busybox. It removed the original error message but finally did not work either.

The output of rtcwake -m no -s 30 is:

wakeup from "no" at Sat Nov 16 14:25:00 2013
rtcwake: short write

Which does not seem to be right. Also when I use -m mem or -m standby with nohup it logs that line

rtcwake: short write

and does not wake up and refresh the screen.
There is also no effect on /proc/driver/rtc.

I found a similar problem on a device called AM1808 EVM also with a removable sd card running the whole system. They suggested to activate the kernel parameter MMC_UNSAFE_RESUME but looking at the source on GitHub in all files where that parameter is mentioned it is already set to "y".

Now some actual questions:

1. Has anyone suffered similar problems?
2. Can I be shure that MMC_UNSAFE_RESUME is actually enabled? How to check at runtime?
3. What could be other reasons that the Kobo Mini does not wake up again?
4. Are there more differences in the OS than one year ago?

[z000ao8q]

hello,
which firmware do you have?
perhaps downgrading to 2.6.35.3-850 and firmware 2.5. would work - thats mine.

Crond: the app was there only crontab-file was missing. but it could be created with crontab -e

rtcwake: mine was compiled back then for the 2.5 binaries. i don´t know if it can work with the newer firmware

how do you know that it does not wake up/ how do you test it?
when you are in terminal, the connection is lost during the progress so you can't recognize.

I would test with one little .sh
- echo timestamp into log-file
- trigger rtcwake
- echo timestamp into log-file

this should work actually.

I have to revise my guide. I found the crond not to work reliable. due to time shifts if the internal clock, the timing was not good.
I am now sending the sleep out of the main update.sh again, right after the processing is done.
So basically a kind of endless-loop. works very stable.


by the way: the batterie lasts for 1 month with 12 wake ups per day.

[DonTomme]

Hi there, sorry for the late reply but I became a dad in the meantime ;-)

Where can I check my firmware version? I am using an unregistered Kobo Mini so I never got into the real user menu. This is my linux version: Linux version 2.6.35.3-850-gbc67621+ (gallen@gallen-P5KPL-AM-BM) (gcc version 4.4.4 (4.4.4_09.06.2010) ) #617 PREEMPT Mon Apr 22 11:07:47 CST 2013
That seems to be the same kernel as yours.

But: How do I do a real firmware downgrade?
I read that the Kobo actually is not downgradable. I tried two different update packages from the firmware thread but they both locked down the Kobo during boot. One of them was 2.1.4 I think. Am I missing another source for firmware files?

I tested rtcwake with different modifications of this script via nohup sleeptest.sh >> test.log &:

echo 1 > /sys/power/state-extended
sh /mnt/weather/wifi-down.sh
/mnt/weather/busybox_kobo rtcwake -a -s 30 -m mem
sh /mnt/weather/wifi-up.sh
zcat /mnt/weather/moon.raw.gz | /usr/local/Kobo/pickel showpic

I used different options for rtcwake (-a, -u, -l) but nothing worked. It never refreshed the screen, came up with telnet or wrote something to the logfile.

I think this could be important:
What I also did in my desperation was to compile an rtc testing binary (on my ARM NAS) from the official rtc documentation and ran it on the Kobo: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/rtc.txt (source at the end of the file).
This is what it tested and what did and did not work:

• Test the availability of an RTC device: works
• Read the current time from RTC: works
• Set an alarm (+5 seconds): seems to work
• Read the alarm time: always gives 00:00:00
• Wait for the alarm: never fires

So because that testing binary uses ioctl() to set the alarm, there can only be an issue either with the kernel/rtc-driver or with the hardware itself.

[cyprien]

z000ao8q you made my day

Your rtcwake without the check works like a charm here, on my KT N905J 3.0.1 Linux version 2.6.35.3-850-gbc67621+ (gallen@gallen-desktop) (gcc version 4.4.4 (4.4.4_09.06.2010) ) #593 PREEMPT Mon Aug 27 17:17:40 CST 2012.

./busybox_kobo rtcwake -m mem -s 3600

And it correctly go to sleep and wake up one hour later by itself

[cyprien]

Hi DonTomme, did you turn off wifi and unload its modules before going to sleep? On mine, if I don't do it kernel is not resuming correctly (or not going to sleep correctly, I have no way to debug that (yet)).

[MichaelPeterson]

Hi there,

has anyone alreadycompiled a kernel with the MMC_UNSAFE_RESUME turned on?

It seems that is exactly the problem i have with my kobo devices, when trying to use rtcwake.

I will try to do it on my own, but i never compiled anything myself, so i fear it will take a lot of time, and probably cost me one or two kobos on the way

by the way, i love everything you guys achieved with the kobo, made me even learn more than the "save" option in vi-Editor.

greetings, michael

[DonTomme]

Hi MichaelPeterson,

I do not think that MMC_UNSAFE_RESUME is disabled. Just do a
zcat /proc/config.gz | grep MMC_UNSAFE
on your Kobo. In my case it said the following:
CONFIG_MMC_UNSAFE_RESUME=y
Which means that the kernel had alerady been compiled with this option enabled.

BTW I never had the time to learn and try re-compiling a new kernel. Therefore my Kobo is now running wired. The advantage is, that I do not need to care about battery consumption and can do Updates every 10 Minutes.

[MichaelPeterson]

Thanks for the reply DonTomme!

Indeed, i get "CONFIG_MMC_UNSAFE_RESUME=y", which makes me wonder, if there is more than one switch, you need to change in the kernel.

Seems like we are not the only ones with that problem, i stumbled over this ubuntu bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ls/+bug/342096

Sadly the cable option is no way to go for me, cause then i could use a normal tablet.

Having a wall mounted display, that you can put anywhere, without having to worry about the power consumption for a long period of time is what makes the kobo so appealing to me.

[pizzamonster]

The rtcwake command doesn't work on my Kobo Mini N705. The system does sleep but never wakes up.
I also compiled and tweaked the rtcwake application from the gomuko project (because it's standalone) and that shows me that the alarm is set (from dmesg):

[msp430_setalarm-789] alarm 10

and fires an interrupt:

[msp_int-1659] MSP430 interrupt triggered !!!

but also doesn't wake the Kobo up.

Ideas and suggestions are welcome. Maybe someone can share me a SD card image with a kernel that does support suspend and resume? I would be eager to know if it's hardware related.

Thanks for all the good info.

Kobo Mini N705 - Kernel: 2.6.35.3-850-gbc67621+