Boox (M92) developer community?

[janek]

Originally Posted by bartp5

For all terminal junkies out there with a boox m92 I present "betty boox", a terminal emulator for the boox. Now you can run all your favorite software on your boox! Betty Boox is based on betty and adapted for the boox. Sources are at https://github.com/bartp5/betty_boox. Installer scripts and compiled program are attached.

Very nice, thank you ! The only issue i can see is that screen keyboard is rather sluggish - works much slower than the one in readers/web app.

VV It looks like screen refresh issue. Display gets corrupted sometimes.

[bartp5]

Yeah, I am aware of that issue. So far I have not found a way around it. I can make it faster but then the letters become unreadable.

[janek]

A build of ImageMagick working on Boox
http://himiko.dnsalias.net/wordpress...7-3-8-for-arm/
Didn't test it too much, but I was able to generate a simple pdf using it, so it looks like it... just works.

[erkkia]

Inspired by a similar effort for the Kindle DX, I made a VNC viewer kind of app that lets you use the Boox M92 as a secondary (or even primary) monitor for your computer.
It's far from a full blown VNC client and since I did it for myself the code is rather hack-ish. However, while probably not optimal, the application does everything I need and I'm actually using it to type this post. If there is interest I'll gladly share the code.
Connectivity is done over g_serial (USB). For the record speeds achieved were around 300 KB/s, for transfer of image data this is sufficient considering how many updates per second an e-ink screen can do. The application can handle 1366x768 resolution (Part of it was cut off) and 1024x768 very nicely. Both of them 16 shade (4-bit) greyscale.

The solution involves two components: a simple custom application on the M92 and a modified version of TightVNC on the host (I'm using Windows) side.
Currently it's view only so no events are sent back from M92 to the computer. I ran into difficulties with two-way communication and had to drop the feature altogether for now.

[tuxor]

ImageMagick and VNC client. That sounds fantastic! Keep up the good work

@erkkia: If you are willing to share your application, don't hesitate to upload it somewhere and post a link. To be honest, I personally don't need a VNC client for my M92 at the moment - but in general I can think of many use cases and like the idea very much.

[erkkia]

The application source code and binaries are attached, for lack of a better name it's called "Serial VNC".
It's tested on Windows 7 64bit and Boox M92 firmware 1.7.20120607.

I hope somebody finds it useful! And a big thanks all the others who have contributed to the Boox m92 developer community so far.

[janek]

Originally Posted by erkkia

The application source code and binaries are attached, for lack of a better name it's called "Serial VNC".
It's tested on Windows 7 64bit and Boox M92 firmware 1.7.20120607.

I hope somebody finds it useful! And a big thanks all the others who have contributed to the Boox m92 developer community so far.

Impressive job, thank you. Do you think your solution will work with other OSes server-side? I have no experience whatsoever with vnc so i don't know to what extent this is likely to work with linux, android or ios...

[erkkia]

Originally Posted by janek

Do you think your solution will work with other OSes server-side? I have no experience whatsoever with vnc so i don't know to what extent this is likely to work with linux, android or ios...

The computer aka host aka server side uses Java. It should work fine on linux, Mac OSX and Windows without any source code changes. Just be sure to get the serial port name correctly. That's the theory at least - would love to hear if it actually works as well.

AFAIK Android would need a separate Java build and iOS does not run Java. So for these two platforms the provided binaries/source will not work out of the box.

[janek]

Originally Posted by erkkia

The computer aka host aka server side uses Java. It should work fine on linux, Mac OSX and Windows without any source code changes. Just be sure to get the serial port name correctly. That's the theory at least - would love to hear if it actually works as well.

So no, it appears it does not work properly on Linux. I followed your instructions and can't get the Serial_VNC to connect to PC. The "ring" just stops rotating, and that's it, there's no trace of connection in vnc's logfile. I'm able to connect to m92's getty via gserial (port is /dev/ttyACM0) so this is not the port issue.

I used "vanilla" vnc-java client as it comes from tightvnc as well as vanilla vnc server 1.3.9 (it says protocol versions supported 3.3, 3.7, 3.8, 3.7t, 3.8t) and i'm able to connect to the vnc server on localhost to view my own desktop. So it appears vnc works.

I noticed though that on linux the default port for VNC is 5901, not 5900 (display 0 is the X server...) so perhaps this is the issue. Does Serial_VNC presuppose the connection will be to 5900? (edit: forcing vnc to use display 0 corrupts display on client, but server works - still, this didnt help to Serial_VNC not running)

Also, vnc-server asks for user password. Should I perhaps run it without password? (edit: apparently there's no obvious way to do it but i have view-only password set to "no").

[janek]

Just to share an idea:
use this with this to get a DropBox client on Boox in one afternoon?

[xkjq]

@erkkia

Just tried your Serial VNC on my icarus excel and it seems to works perfectly on linux.

Just a quick heads up to anyone running ubuntu precise (12.04), if you're trying to connect to your current X server using x11vnc the current version in the repositories is broken. Upgrading to the latest version (available in the quantal repos - https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/quantal....9.13-1ubuntu1) should fix it.


@janek

The :0 display is usually your current active display which you should be able to connect to if you want.

Regarding your problems, what happens when you try and launch erkkia's client (before you try and connect to it with the boox)?

e.g. when you run

java -Dboox_serial_port=/dev/ttyACM0 -jar tightvnc-jviewer.jar -JpegImageQuality=Lossless -ViewOnly=No

[janek]

Originally Posted by xkjq

@janek

The :0 display is usually your current active display which you should be able to connect to if you want.

Regarding your problems, what happens when you try and launch erkkia's client (before you try and connect to it with the boox)?

Stupid me. I was using generic client, not erkkia's. Now it works just fine.

[bartp5]

I thought I'd share some scripts I wrote to password-protect files and folders on my boox. I made the scripts such that when encrypting a file the script automatically packs in any annotations and notes related to the file. When installed it creates two applications in the applications menu, one to encrypt and one to decrypt. The encrypting script lets you select a file of which it then creates a self-extracting script-archive (in the directory where the original files were). I made this program primarily to encrypt pdf files together with the annotations and wanted to make it easy to open, edit, close and re-encrypt the file. I therefore made the script-archive such that when clicking the archive it prompts for a password, attempts to de-crypt your file, and upon success open the file. After editing the file the file is automatically re-encrypted when the file is closed. This automatic opening and re-encryption currently works for txt files (nice for saving your passwords in a text file on your boox) and pdf files (with the old pdf-reader). This functionality can easily be extended to other file-types For all other file-types and for directories clicking the script once de-crypts, clicking it again re-encrypts the files.

For the encryption it uses ncrypt (AES-encryption). After encrypting files the original files are deleted (use at your own risk and keep backups). Note however that in flash memory there is no way to reliably access a specific physical location due to the flash transition layer. This makes it impossible to do a secure delete of a single file in flash memory (i.e. after encryption and subsequent deletion of the original files, large chunks of the original files are still floating around in the flash memory and could be accessed with specialized software). So bear that in mind when you encrypt your multi-million dollar secrets.

The script use slightly modified versions of the previously published scripting primitives. The filebrowser was adapted to be able to open directories (a lazy hack really, created a button to select a directory) and the input widget was adapted to return an empty string when the escape of close button is clicked (so one can abort typing a password and my scripts will abort too) and I made a bugfix which made the switching between plain text and password input a bit awkward.

The installer script includes the scripting archives (and asks before overwriting anything). I attached a zip file with the program and installer scripts and a patch file so you can patch the source of kodomo's scripting primitives.

Hope you can make sense of this post

[jabolo]

Hello all!

I just bought my Icarus Excel with hope that it would be possible to use it as a secondary monitor. I was very happy to see erkkia's accomplishment. Great work, thank you.

Having little or no experience in IT, I wasn't able to implement Erkkia's instructions. I am using Windows Vista Home Edition and Icarus Excel.
I think I have problems with second part of the instructions from the readme.txt

"
2. TightVNC client
==================
Get it from http://www.tightvnc.com/download.php

Some source files are modified and included in this archive.
Modified version is included in this archive.

List of modified source files from TightVNC java viewer 2.5.2: (
src/viewer_swing/java/com/glavsoft/viewer/swing/Surface.java
src/viewer_swing/java/com/glavsoft/viewer/Viewer.java
src/main/java/com/glavsoft/rfb/protocol/ReceiverTask.java[/I][/I][/I][/I]

"

Currently the only version available for download is version 2.6 , which may be my problem.

Would you please let me know in a simple language, how to "modify" these source files?
I have spent a week trying to learn about it, and no luck. I have no knowledge of java. I got Eclipse , but don't know how to use it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thank you

[erkkia]

Originally Posted by jabolo

Would you please let me know in a simple language, how to "modify" these source files?
I have spent a week trying to learn about it, and no luck. I have no knowledge of java. I got Eclipse , but don't know how to use it.

Hi Jabolo,
As you might know, TightVNC is composed of the "server" and "client".
You can get both the server and client from http://www.tightvnc.com/download.php, but for Serial VNC purposes, get just the server from http://www.tightvnc.com/download.php and get the (already modified, you don't need to do anything!) client from the Serial VNC zip file.

Although I haven't tested it, v2.6 on server side and v2.5.2 on client side should work together nicely. Sorry but right now I don't have the time to test or provide a 2.6 client build.

Btw, it seems you can still get 2.5.2 from TightVNC's website:
http://www.tightvnc.com/download/2.5...etup-32bit.msi
http://www.tightvnc.com/download/2.5...etup-64bit.msi