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Old 02-22-2013, 04:26 AM   #9
euphy
Junior Member
euphy doesn't littereuphy doesn't litter
 
Posts: 7
Karma: 142
Join Date: Jan 2013
Device: kobo mini
Hi Kevin, first of all I want to say thanks for the work you've done, and written up about getting pygame etc running on the Kobo - dead useful and very encouraging.

The kobo mini is the only one I've used, and that has a hardware serial port present on the PCB itself (bottom right corner of the PCB in the middle pic in my original post). The kobo touch has the same port, so I assume the glo does too, but I can't find a teardown of it to look at.

All I did was solder some sockets into those holes. The pins exposed are GND, RX, TX and +3.3V, of which you need to connect up only GND, RX, TX. So that gets you a TTL serial port which might be useful if you're interfacing with another TTL thing, like an arduino or something. But for connecting to a computer I needed a TTL-to-USB converter.

I used one of these
http://www.elecfreaks.com/store/ardu...pter-p-16.html because I wanted the other features on it,
but there's lots of different kinds (http://shop.moderndevice.com/products/usb-bub), including ones that are built into the cable (http://www.tronisoft.com/prod.php?id=2472). Just as long as it's a 3.3v version rather than a 5v version. Most of the PCB-ish ones can be switched to 3.3 or 5v with a switch or jumper.

So use jumper wires (http://www.elecfreaks.com/store/1-pi...pcs-p-165.html) to connect the transmit (TX) of the kobo to the receive (RX) of the usb adapter, the kobo RX to the adapter TX, and the kobo GND to the adapter GND. Don't need to worry about the kobo supply (3.3v) since the usb adapter is already powered over the usb bus.

The usb device (cable, bub, adapter whatever it is) shows up as a virtual com port on the PC, and I used PuTTY to connect to it. PuTTY has a "serial" method of connection, and I just used the default settings I think, but I can check that later if you like.

My problem is that the root terminal that is exposed this way (which is the same as the one that is exposed over the wifi telnet thing) is exactly that - the root terminal. So all the activity on the kobo is being reported over it, so there's a lot of noise. For my purpose, I want a fairly clean channel that I can pipe commands over, that isn't going to be interrupted by the kobo system's messages every now and then. So I think what I might try to do is get the usb-ethernet set up instead, and ssh between the kobo and the pi. I couldn't get the usb-ethernet working last time I tried, so it's time to try again.

Maybe that's helpful! Anything you want me to test, just ask.

sn
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