Kindle 3, replace screen

[giorgio130]

As some of you might know, I recently received a Kindle 3 with a broken screen to experiment on. Today popping it open I found out it is a 3g kindle, while mine is just wifi. So I thought, why not swapping the screens?
Now I'm asking to you, is this a good idea? I know every screen has its own waveform, but I don't know if it's stored on the motherboard or on a chip of the screen itself. So it could be either painless or more convoluted...
Of course having the original unit where I would be taking the screen I should have also its waveform somewhere in its memory, but I don't know where it is and how to flash it on the new unit. Any advice is welcome!

[thomass]

may help:

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by giorgio130

As some of you might know, I recently received a Kindle 3 with a broken screen to experiment on. Today popping it open I found out it is a 3g kindle, while mine is just wifi. So I thought, why not swapping the screens?
Now I'm asking to you, is this a good idea? I know every screen has its own waveform, but I don't know if it's stored on the motherboard or on a chip of the screen itself. So it could be either painless or more convoluted...
Of course having the original unit where I would be taking the screen I should have also its waveform somewhere in its memory, but I don't know where it is and how to flash it on the new unit. Any advice is welcome!

As I understand it, the waveform is stored in the ROM chip on the display flex cable. I got my k3wifi with damaged cable into "Voice Guide" mode (which makes it usable with no display), but temporarily borrowing the display from a k3g. Because the connectors are mounted near the edge, you can temporarily "borrow" a display without removing it from the other kindle. Swapping displays worked very well.

Unfortunately, although my K3wifi and K4nt had identical eInk pearl displays, the flex cables have DIFFERENT connectors, so I cannot use the good display in my bricked k4nt on my k3wifi.

P.S. No current debricking procedure works on my k4nt. A glitch in diagnostics changed its serial number and board ID to "1" and u-boot will not initialize an "unknown board type".

[giorgio130]

Thank you all, I swapped the screens and everything went well, no waveform had to be flashed. (ps geekmaster can't you just sent it back under warranty?)

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by giorgio130

Thank you all, I swapped the screens and everything went well, no waveform had to be flashed. (ps geekmaster can't you just sent it back under warranty?)

I have stuff on /mnt/us that I do not want amazon to see.

And besides... If too many kindles get sent back that were bricked from poking around under the hood, they will just lock it down much tighter to save replacement and support costs. We do not want that to happen any time soon...