So my Kindle Voyage serial jailbreak was a success. Using sewing pins was very finicky and they kept slipping off the contact points. So for anyone else going that route I'd recommend finding some sturdy foam at least half an inch thick to help keep the pins in place. But maintaining the contact points with the Kindle board was the biggest issue I ran into.
A couple other stumbles were:
- When booting into diagnostics mode I didn't realize that there would only be one second to press any key and interrupt the regular boot. But in addition to using the Kindle menus to reboot, holding down the power button for 15-20 seconds also worked to reboot and try again.
- Once in diagnostics mode, the keyboard shortcuts didn't work for me (I'm not sure why), so I used the touchscreen instead to get to the login prompt ("Reboot or Disable Diags" then "Exit to login prompt").
- When using the vi tool to edit the password file, I could save using :w but couldn't figure out how to get the reboot command to work. Holding down the power button worked fine for me there too.
Aside from figuring out those small issues, everything went pretty smoothly.
I have a couple small contributions to make.
Python didn't generate the correct password for me (could have been user error on my part). I found
this site that generates the possible Kindle passwords based on a serial number. Quick, easy, and no need for Python.
And finally, I verified that the Kindle Voyage contact point for voltage is the spot noted in the attached image.
Thanks to everyone on this thread for guiding us through the jailbreak, particularly grant2, knc1, and NiLuJe.