Rotate direction

[Mr. X]

Originally Posted by Mr. X

Ah right, the DR1000-only part I punted on 'cause I don't have one :-) Although reading the driver code I guess what left and right on the page bar means by default is controlled by the ionkbd orientation... Since there's already the direction flip for that I don't think the DR800 really needs a "flipped" mapping. When I feel like procrastinating and the 3.0 SDK for the DR1000 is out maybe I'll fix that part up for completeness.

Was simple enough to add, although I can't really test it since I don't have a DR1000 or a DR1000 running 3.0... But here is the diff for anyone interested.

[Mr. X]

And, for the adventurous:

This package will replace the original sysd daemon with a new version
which supports flipping portrait mode 180 degrees. Once the new sysd
is installed you can control the portrait orientation by adding the
following line to the [registry] section of System/dr.ini on your
flash card:

/apps/er/sys/display/flip=true

To return to normal orientation without uninstalling sysd set the
dr.ini setting to false and reboot (hold power switch for 5 seconds).

Before updating to any future version of this mod be sure to uninstall
it first. If something goes horribly wrong you can reflash the
firmware on your reader to remove the modification.

[Gertjan]

Originally Posted by Mr. X

So the big question before I install this on my $400 toy (and release a build others can try) is: does reflashing the firmware kick off from redboot or does linux need to successfully boot, or even more worrisome linux needs to boot and sysd need to be running?

Reflashing involves redboot and a separate 'upgrade kernel' which you normally don't touch. You can always reflash as follows: extract a firmware update to the SD card (see support.irexreader.com), insert the card into the device and hold power switch to reset. This will restore everything on the device, including the kernel, except settings stored in /home/root/.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

How about attacking this from the other direction. Instead of getting the device to flip the content, is there software that will take a PDF and save it with all of the pages "upside down" as images rather than text. That way, as far as the DR800 knows, it's just displaying a normal PDF.

Might be an okay workaround. But I'd prefer, having the very same PDF for all readers and changing orientation on the reader.

[Matthijs]

*never mind*

[Mr. X]

So if anyone else is using the 180° flip sysd, you will have noticed that it annoyingly switches to landscape after connecting via USB... I finally got annoyed enough and tracked this down to several places where the get_orientation IPC call assumes that any orientation other than portrait means landscape... Combined with the fact that get_orientation() returns the exact orientation while set_orientation() (which should really be called set_rotated()) takes a relative orientation, my patch has become a bit bigger...

Reading through all the open sourced irex code, it doesn't look like the get_orientation IPC call is ever used to check anything other than rotation status. So rather than push "portrait" == "flip" into every module, I have changed get_orientation() to only return "portrait" or "landscape" to match set_rotation() which only takes "portrait" "landscape" or "flip". I can't think of a case where something outside of sysd would care about clockwise/anticlockwise landscape or normal/flip portrait, they just care if its 1024x768 or 768x1024.

Hopefully this feature makes it into the official source at some point...

Both the first diff and this one are needed.

[John F]

What is the status of the rotating? I don't see any mention of it in the latest beta.

[Gwaihir]

Another rotating issue / request, DR1000 this time: the button locks don't rotate. iRex, could you please make the button locks rotate along with the screen orientation?

I'm a lefty, so I often have the buttons on the left locked out to make notes. Also, I read full screen a lot, i.e. I don't often "waste" space for the task / menu bar at the bottom. However, when I switch to landscape mode, I really need to remember to unlock the left button first, as that becomes the much needed bottom one now. I think it would be a lot better if these locks were to rotate along with the screen orientation.

[Matthijs]

I'm not sure about rotating the sensor lock, but we can take a look at that.

In the 2.0-beta firmware, we do now disable fullscreen when pressing CONFIRM (middle sensor) so you should not get trapped in fullscreen mode. Does that already help a bit?

[Gwaihir]

Originally Posted by Matthijs

I'm not sure about rotating the sensor lock, but we can take a look at that.

In the 2.0-beta firmware, we do now disable fullscreen when pressing CONFIRM (middle sensor) so you should not get trapped in fullscreen mode. Does that already help a bit?

Eh.. sounds tricky. Only when both locked & in full screen mode, I hope?

You mean the CONFIRM will continue to work, even when locked, right? I hope that's only in full screen mode, or it will be annoying for folk that actually want to lock it.

Likewise: is that only when it actually was locked out? When using full screen, I'll sooner or later press confirm to bring up the menu. That doesn't mean I want to bring out the stylus and reselect full screen (or go through a few too many menus with the cursor) when I continue reading that book; that would be quite annoying.

(I haven't tried the beta yet. Mainly waiting for the reported contrast issues to be resolved. Somewhat waiting for the default thumbnail indexing to be switched off.)