PRS-500 Reader internals

[igorsk]

http://rafb.net/paste/results/CChSNL92.html

Edit: See post #5 for the content

[alexishinds]

Interesting...so how did you generate that listing? That would seem to imply that I should be able to copy and RTF (or at least PDF) over to the reader on my Mac without going through Parallels if I could actually mount it...assuming that's what you did.

--Alexis

[porkupan]

Are you saying you have figured out how to log in and get a shell prompt? Or mount the ebook as a removable drive?

Are we going to see some unicode fonts dropped to the /opt/sony/ebook/FONT soon?

[Slava]

Originally Posted by igorsk

http://rafb.net/paste/results/CChSNL92.html

Nice job

Any idea how to add another TTF font over there ?-)

[TadW]

Sooooo cool, igor!

Now - how did you do that?

(I attached the text file here in case it disappears from the original location, hope you don't mind).

[hkabir]

It seems like the Reader has a lot of fitures not yet activated like the wireless network support. See the following code:

/etc/network
		/etc/network/ping-places.sh
		/etc/network/pcmcia-compat.sh
		/etc/network/options
		/etc/network/interfaces
		/etc/network/ifstate
		/etc/network/if-up.d
		/etc/network/if-pre-up.d
			/etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wireless-tools
		/etc/network/if-post-down.d
		/etc/network/if-down.d
		/etc/network/get-mac-address.sh
		/etc/network/check-mac-address.sh

[ultim8fury]

I wouldn't read into it too much as they still have Vi and sed in there as well. Standard linux guts.

[NatCh]

They also don't have any wireless hardware, which would make wireless networking rather difficult, regardless of what the software might be able to do.

[igorsk]

Sorry for the suspense guys I didn't want to release incomplete code.
Here's a more-or-less complete version which allows you to list the files on the device and download them.
It needs Python with ctypes package and uses dlls from Connect software. So the best way to get it running is to drop the file in "\Program Files\Sony\CONNECT Reader\Data\bin".
To list the files:
ebook.py ls <dir> [-R]
-R means "list recursively". I disabled recursion for /dev and /proc subtrees since that can lead to infinite loops.
E.g.:
ebook.py ls /
ebook.py ls /etc/ -R
To download files:
ebook.py get <path>
E.g.:
ebook.py get /Data/tmp/info/model
ebook.py get /etc/init.d/

Be careful when downloading "files" from /dev and /proc, some of them has no EOF and the program reads infinitely.
So far I only had to reset the unit once so there shouldn't be much problems, but as usual: USE IT ON YOUR OWN RISK.

[Slava]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Sorry for the suspense guys I didn't want to release incomplete code.
Here's a more-or-less complete version which allows you to list the files on the device and download them.

simply amazing

can't wait to get home and try it

[gseryakov]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Here's a more-or-less complete version which allows you to list the files on the device and download them.
It needs Python with ctypes package and uses dlls from Connect software.

Impressing job! Especially impressing those who does not know Python.

AFAIU, this is just using the following functions exported from DLL (@-number is probably the stack usage):

_UsbSendProc@16
_UsbReceiveProc@12
_UsbBuffFree@4
_UsbInitCheck@0
_UsbGetProtcolVer@8
_UsbUnlockDevice@4
_UsbConnect@0
_UsbDisConnect@0

Do we have more or less regular description of this interface? I mean - prototypes plus parameters description.

Is it the full list of functions exported from the usb dll?

[igorsk]

@N means the function has N bytes of arguments (stdcall convention). The DLL I use (ebookUsb.dll) is actually a higher-level one. It uses lower level calls from prsctr.dll, which in turn speaks to the driver (PRSUSB.sys) and the driver actually talks to the Reader over USB. So, while I more or less know how to use the high-level interface, I don't know how it maps to the actual USB traffic. However, a person with a USB spy program can probably recover this information pretty easily and that could be useful to people with other OSes.

[igorsk]

Here's the full list of functions provided by ebookUsb.dll:

_CheckBlock@0
_UsbBeginEnd@4
_UsbBuffFree@4
_UsbCancelCallBack@0
_UsbConnect@0
_UsbConvertDevPathToPCPath@8
_UsbConvertDriveLetterToID@8
_UsbConvertIDToDriveLetter@8
_UsbConvertPCPathToDevPath@8
_UsbDisConnect@0
_UsbElectricIsConnect@0
_UsbEndSecureSession@0
_UsbFreeDevProperty@4
_UsbGetDevProperty@4
_UsbGetIDforPC@8
_UsbGetProtcolVer@8
_UsbGetdevNofromID@4
_UsbInitCheck@0
_UsbKeyExchangeAndAuthentication@0
_UsbReceiveProc@12
_UsbSendProc@16
_UsbSendReceiveProc@20
_UsbSetCallBack@8
_UsbUnlockDevice@4

[gseryakov]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Here's the full list of functions provided by ebookUsb.dll:
...

Great!!! And what is the way to update system files? Because once we know (full credit to igorsk) how to get a file from Reader, the next step is to change it and put it back. Oh, no! I forgot - we should be able to make system repair before this step.

[igorsk]

Yeah, there is a function to write files too. I'm going to implement it later.