Kindle Battery Surgery [Success!]

[geekmaster]

Please watch this ted talk and the 4 vids in the post above (to completion, when you have time and interest). I love that stuff and would like to discuss it (though probably only in PMs, to keep the "bye-bye" and "delete" buttons unpressed). And for safety's sake, I probably need to name future threads with much more generic titles, like "stuff geekmaster says" or something.

I need a generic (interesting stuff) thread, and only the dev corner here feels like home to me. But heck, even pdurrant discussed color systems in a thread clearly devoted to something else completely (color subtopic started by cinisajoy). So the freedom we have here to discuss whatever stream-of-consciousness itch needs scratching is what makes this place interesting. I love the multi-dimensional interaction.

[knc1]

This often happens after a thread has 'reached its point' (an answer given and acknowledged).

Nobody is picking on you -
We do this to anybody's ("finished") thread when there is nothing else to do than just chat.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by knc1

This often happens after a thread has 'reached its point' (an answer given and acknowledged).

Nobody is picking on you -
We do this to anybody's ("finished") thread when there is nothing else to do than just chat.

I am being divergent (or is it "deviant") here too (right along with y'all), until I have another battery-modification post. Working on it...

But as some of us know, posting SOMETHING to a forum is a REAL addiction, even if we cannot find an appropriate topic for our current interests. Yeah, that "help desk junkie" thing. I recently had to resort to facebook again (shudder) for awhile. Though on facebook, I mostly act as a boingboing and ycombinator news filter, passing along links that interest me (perhaps with excerpts that grabbed my attention). Whereas in tech forums, my content is more original experimental "stream of thought" which is MUCH MORE FUN.

I need to finish my coffee and head to a distant "you pull" auto graveyard -- then do some car repair. But first I need to find my tools. I brought them in the house last I recall, but they got "put away". I would hate to have to buy new ones when I have too many duplicate tools already...

[geekmaster]

I have now uninstalled CRP from my PW3 (a bit risky perhaps considering that the touchscreen often does not work). However, I modified my KUAL script so it is now repeating a loop with my kindle video player showing my gmvid.gmv.xz (higher compression than .gz) with frontlight brightness set to maximum, and no USB cable. It is running only on my little LiPo in the dead battery frame as shown previously.

Because my script pauses the framework, it should play this video repeatedly until it drains the battery and shuts off. Time for some sleep now, and hopefully ready for the next step (charging a dead low (remaining) capacity battery, which was NOT successful with coward's rescue pack installed.

If it boots okay and charges the battery, that means we need to fix CRP, which I will attempt to do (a "boot main after five consecutive diags reboots, so it can charge" workaround, with frontlight off too). I will keep y'all posted.

To be continued...

EDIT: Over one hour of video at maximum frontlight brightness on my PW3 running only on my 500mAh LiPo battery, and still going strong. Next time I run this test I will need to setup logging with it, so I can see just how long it ran before battery exhaustion. I will need to do this test again during the CRP "low battery fix" testing anyway, so a good time to add logging to this battery-draining video player test script. Then perhaps another timed test with frontlight off, just for fun, eh? Signing off to get some sleep, and I expect a dead battery in the morning.

[geekmaster]

Okay now, I have had some sleep, my PW3 was dead (turned off when the battery voltage became too low to continue).

I plugged it into a charger, then the display lit up, and it immediately display the "dead battery" display, then turned off, with the charging LED illuminated in amber. This is how it is SUPPOSED to behave with a dead battery. It charged for about five minutes, and then it booted to the diagnostics screen, but with the frontlight LED turned completely off. I peeled the bezel up to verify that yes, the LEDs are off (I needed to install that bezel because at full frontlight brightness it was painful to look at my PW3 without it).

I am curious at this behavior, because after UNINSTALLING the coward's rescue pack, it display "** CRP **" during bootup, but then booted to the main GUI framework anyway, so I was able to use KUAL to launch my video player battery draining test (with a bit of touchscreen difficulty). And even more curious now, because it was in main when the battery died, and now it is in diags (while plugged into the charger).

That seems contrary to design, and therefore I am unsure how to proceed. It acts like CRP is still installed after I attempted to uninstall it, but the "naughty" behavior ceased.

Now what? I will need to get in there with SSH and study it to see what is going on. But first, I will let this PW3 charge its battery until it shows a green LED.

What I find strange is that every couple of minutes the screen flashes white and then it redraws the diags menu. I just touched the screen (not on a menu item) and it switched to a "Suspend mode" diags screen, as I had mentioned previously in this thread. Perhaps that is a battery saving feature. At least it is not "diags boot looping" any more.

I installied the jailbreak, and the rescue pack and CRP from NiLuJe's collection of downloads. The uninstall was from a recent download from that same location.

Any suggestions what to look for after this device is charged, or how I should install things differently, or what steps I should try next?

[geekmaster]

My PW3 just switched itself to the diags USB EXPORT function. It is asking me to connect its USB cable to my PC. I did not do that. The flaky touchscreen must have selected that menu item without my consent. Hopefully it won't do something bad by pressing random menu items, like erase my idme vars or something...

Meanwhile, still charging on a USB charger (except the power LED just now turned off). Hmm... Is it charging or not? Perhaps time to plug it into my PC, even if not fully charged.

Update: okay, connect to PC. Screen changed to say "USB device exported", and it also says "Battery capacity 97" so if that can be trusted, then it is almost fully charged. I will let it sit and see if that number goes up or down. The power LED is still off. And strangely, my computer detected the Tobii Eye Tracking device again, which tells me it is exporting the USBnet RNDIS device and NOT the "USB device" (i.e. USB mass storage) as it claims.

More weird behavior. Ghosts in the machine.

Update2: However, my computer sees it as a USB drive, matching what is on the PW3 display, despite that RNDIS device detection. Interesting. It is not in the routing table, so that must have been a transitory phase after plugging the kindle into my host PC USB port. USBnet has "auto" set, so perhaps that had something to do with it?

[geekmaster]

I just selected "disable diags" and it rebooted (with the USB cable still attached to my PC). I did not see the "** CRP **" text displayed this time. However, it rebooted to diags again, even though I uninstalled CRP (using MRinstaller) and it appeared to succeed.

I will reboot now without the USB cable. Disabling diags again... Hopefully that 97-percent battery report was correct. But then again, it did run well over an hour (how long is unknown at this point in time) with maximum frontlight while drawing an 800x600 image to the screen every 130 milliseconds.

It is at the GUI framework now. Plugging in the USB cable... "Eye Tracker connected" message (RNDIS driver loaded). However, even though the kindle is showing up as a USB networking device at 192.168.15.244, I cannot ping it (permission denied). Nor can I SSH to it. Time to force it in KUAL?

KUAL usbnet says "USBNetwork enabled (usbnet, sshd up)". but not working. Hmm... At least the touchscreen is working at the moment. Unplugging and replugging the USB cable turned on the amber power LED. And now it is green. Fully charged 500mA LiPo battery using the kindle to top off the charge.

But still, some weird behavior to track down in the firmware and installed hacks.

[geekmaster]

Oh, wait. I think USBnet in main uses 192.168.2.2, not 192.168.15.244. Inconvenient to keep switching my static definitions back and forth. Having a DHCP server in the kindle would be cool, if it was not too resource heavy. Then no host PC static IP assignments required. But with the framework loaded, memory is rather scarce as it is. I cannot decompress a .xz video with more than minimal 'xz' compression (memory buffers too big) as it is. However, even a low-compression .xz compressed video file is a lot smaller than a high-compression .gz file, so not a big concern.

Other work to do now -- back on this "hobby" task later.

[Glorfindel]

I also would like a DHCP server fit a static ip. Would be handy at times.

[geekmaster]

Perhaps we could have a DHCP server that only loads if there is a file called /mnt/us/ENABLE_DHCP. Or a KUAL extension to load and unload it. Then easy to control at will. However, if small enough (and it should be) we could leave hdcpd loaded all the time. Even wireless routers with tiny memory have dhcpd. Isn't that an optional feature of dropbear? Need to go now, worth checking out...

[geekmaster]

Or maybe we can use this?
https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/dhcp.dnsmasq

Dnsmasq is lightweight, easy to configure DNS forwarder and DHCP server. It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network.

It looks like twobob already provided one tuned just for us:
https://github.com/twobob/buildroot-...ackage/dnsmasq
and a startup script:
https://github.com/twobob/buildroot-...S80dhcp-server

[geekmaster]

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sedhcp/

A very simple DHCP server for use in embedded systems.
License: Public Domain

PHP Code:

//Minimal DHCP Implementation 
// 

const int forever = 1;

#define DHCPDISCOVER                    1
#define DHCPOFFER                       2
#define DHCPREQUEST                     3
#define DHCPACK                         5

/* 32-bit structure containing 4-digit ip number */
struct id_struct
{
    UINT8 is_ip_addrs[MAX_ADDRESS_SIZE];        /* IP address number */
};

struct addr_struct
{
    INT16    family;             /* family = INTERNET */
    UINT16   port;               /* machine's port number */
    struct   id_struct id;       /* contains the 4-digit ip number for the host machine */
    char     *name;              /* points to machine's name */
};


typedef struct 
{
    UINT8  dp_op;                           /* packet opcode type */
    UINT8  dp_htype;                        /* hardware addr type */
    UINT8  dp_hlen;                         /* hardware addr length */
    UINT8  dp_hops;                         /* gateway hops */
    UINT32 dp_xid;                          /* transaction ID */
    UINT16 dp_secs;                         /* seconds since boot began */
    UINT16 dp_flags;
    UINT8  dp_ciaddr[4];                    /* client IP address */
    UINT8  dp_yiaddr[4];                    /* 'your' IP address */
    UINT8  dp_siaddr[4];                    /* server IP address */
    UINT8  dp_giaddr[4];                    /* gateway IP address */
    UINT8  dp_chaddr[16];                   /* client hardware address */
    UINT8  dp_legacy[192];                   
    UINT8  dp_magic[4];                   
    UINT8  dp_options[275];                    /* options area */
                        /* as of RFC2131 it is variable length */
}DHCP_TYPE;

static INT32  DHCPSocket = -1;
char NewIP[4] = {192,168,0,16};
char New_subnet[] = {1,4,255,255,0,0};
char New_offer[] = {53,1,DHCPOFFER};
char New_ack[] = {53,1,DHCPACK};
char magic_cookie[] = {0x63,0x82,0x53,0x63};

VOID DHCP_Task(UNSIGNED argc, VOID *argv)
{
   struct addr_struct myAddr;
   struct addr_struct sourceAddr;
   struct addr_struct destinationAddr;
   STATUS status;
   DHCP_TYPE DHCP_Buffer;
   struct sock_struct              *sockptr;
   char * option_ptr;

   myAddr.family                   = NU_FAMILY_IP;
   myAddr.port                     = IPPORT_DHCPS;
   memset (myAddr.id.is_ip_addrs,0,4);

   DHCPSocket = NU_Socket(NU_FAMILY_IP, NU_TYPE_DGRAM, 0);
   status = NU_Bind(DHCPSocket, &myAddr, 0);

   while ( forever )
   {
      status = NU_Recv_From( DHCPSocket, (char *)&DHCP_Buffer, sizeof( DHCP_Buffer ), 0 , &sourceAddr, 0);

      if ( status > 0 )
      {
         switch ( DHCP_Buffer.dp_options[2] )
         {
            case DHCPDISCOVER:
               DHCP_Buffer.dp_op = DHCPOFFER;
               memset( &DHCP_Buffer.dp_options, 0, sizeof( DHCP_Buffer.dp_options ));
               memcpy( &DHCP_Buffer.dp_yiaddr, NewIP, 4 );
               memcpy( DHCP_Buffer.dp_magic, magic_cookie, 4 );
               option_ptr = (char *)&DHCP_Buffer.dp_options;
               memcpy( option_ptr, New_offer, 3 );
               option_ptr += 3;
               memcpy( option_ptr, New_subnet, 8 );
               option_ptr += 8;

               destinationAddr.port = IPPORT_DHCPC;
               destinationAddr.family = NU_FAMILY_IP;
               memset( destinationAddr.id.is_ip_addrs , 0xff, 4 ); 
               NU_Send_To( DHCPSocket, (char *)&DHCP_Buffer, sizeof( DHCP_Buffer ), 0 , &destinationAddr, sizeof( destinationAddr ));
               break;

            case DHCPREQUEST:
               DHCP_Buffer.dp_op = DHCPOFFER;
               memset( &DHCP_Buffer.dp_options, 0, sizeof( DHCP_Buffer.dp_options ));
               memcpy( &DHCP_Buffer.dp_yiaddr, NewIP, 4 );
               memcpy( DHCP_Buffer.dp_magic, magic_cookie, 4 );
               option_ptr = (char *)&DHCP_Buffer.dp_options;
               memcpy( option_ptr, New_ack, 3 );
               option_ptr += 3;
               memcpy( option_ptr, New_subnet, 8 );
               option_ptr += 8;

               destinationAddr.port = IPPORT_DHCPC;
               destinationAddr.family = NU_FAMILY_IP;
               memset( destinationAddr.id.is_ip_addrs , 0xff, 4 ); 
               NU_Send_To( DHCPSocket, (char *)&DHCP_Buffer, sizeof( DHCP_Buffer ), 0 , &destinationAddr, sizeof( destinationAddr ));
               break;

            default:
               break;
         }
      } 
   }
} 


Well, that's pretty simple. And it should be tiny too. But it has a lot of redundancy and could be simplified even more.

[NiLuJe]

I might have bundled the dhcp server applet in the busybox build shipped w/ USBNet...
EDIT: Nope, must have dreamed that one up...

That, or shipping dnsmasq or something similar would be trivial, too.

[geekmaster]

The precompiled busybox has udhcpd in it already. They even have a version for my K1, but not useful without usbnet. It would be nice to launch it from the KUAL usbnetwork extension, which should be pretty easy to add.
https://busybox.net/downloads/binaries/

[thatworkshop]

[OFF-TOPIC]

I just logged in MR and was really shocked to read what I read... I am super happy that geekmaster is here.
Mobileread would have not been where it is now without geekmaster (among a few other masters here) and we all owe him A LOT. I consider him as my teacher.

If his account was suspended, I would have abandoned this forum all together. Thanks MR.