Development support hardware

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Have fun cutting up the kindle.
I am going to spend the next little bit attempting to make a baby block.

What's a "baby block"? It sounds like a colloquial term for "birth control"...

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

What's a "baby block"? It sounds like a colloquial term for "birth control"...

A baby block is a small square toy a baby plays with. They usually have letters, numbers and pictures. They are 6 sided.
Now I guess the smaller ones could be used for birth control.
Yes, I will post pictures when I get one done. Each side takes about 30 minutes to stitch.

Now back on topic, good luck knc1.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

- - - -
Now back on topic, good luck knc1.

Thanks.
It is a little bit like a mixture of every craft project skill a person has ever learned.

Starting with making a model, with modeling clay pressed into place, of the size/shape of the inside of that case edge.

After that . . . .
Well, it is one of those "plan as you go" sort of projects.

You cut cross sections of the clay, and start deciding how to mount the new part in whatever you find.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by knc1

Thanks.
It is a little bit like a mixture of every craft project skill a person has ever learned.

Starting with making a model, with modeling clay pressed into place, of the size/shape of the inside of that case edge.

After that . . . .
Well, it is one of those "plan as you go" sort of projects.

Do you need to borrow my tiny steel crochet hooks?
They start at 1mm hooks.

[geekmaster]

Measure twice. Cut once. Cut once again. Fill in the gaps with epoxy?

And despite being SUPER CAREFUL and triple checking, I still dd'd over the partition table on the wrong device. Still trying to recover from that FUBAR. My command history (both root and user) LOOK like I did it right, but the results defy making such conclusions... And worse, the "me too" instructions plastered on the net just make fsck zero out the EXT4 inodes when it deletes all but a handful of (useless) files from the 4TB drive... Making me long for the simplicity of EXT2, eh? And what good is journalling if fsck really wants to delete ALL the files anyway?

EDIT: It just occured to me what went wrong. I was working in a linux VM (on a WINDOWS host). Source drive was USB passed to the VM as a block device. Destination drive was USB passed the VM as a USB device. After copying the beginning of one drive to the other (so later, the Windows EXT IFS driver could SEE the partition table, which was not working on one drive), THEY BOTH HAD THE SAME DRIVE SIGNATURES, which I know from past experience confuses the heck out of Windoze and makes it sometimes write to the WRONG DRIVE. Never mount a pair of cloned drives on Windoze until AFTER altering the drive signature on one of them, And also, never mount a drive on Windoze over USB if it is intended to be used as a data recovery source, because windows writes (and quickly erases) a "readyboost" test file on a drive when you plug it in, and that could eat your lost data for lunch.

EDIT2: I found a backup copy of the first 100mb of the damaged drive. The FIRST attempt at this copy was successful, but changes were not visible (and so was all my lost data) until I rebooted THREE DAYS later. Anyway, I have a copy of the first 100MB from before the damage, the damage was /dev/zero copied to only the first megabyte -- BUT, fsck was run on the damaged drive and deleted millions of files (including the directory structure). Data recovery programs do not find all my archived partition images from various kindles -- instead finding files from INSIDE those partitions; and of course all the filenames are scrambled (with sequence numbers). I have a decades-old collection of hard drives I plan to do data recovery on SOME DAY, but this one is relevant to me at the moment... I am sure it was windows that bit me despite how careful I attempted to do this. In the future, no TWO USB drives passed through to VirtualBox at the same time... Or better, when working with raw drives, get windoze out of the picture completely.

EDIT3: And another thing I did not see before -- the online instructions I used to "fix" the drive used tools that I now see some claim are NOT compatible with my GPT-partitioned disk. Perhaps that is why fsck decided to delete millions on a partition that HAD NO DAMAGE (not the first partition). Only the partition table was damaged until fsck raped my drive (and that was my primary kindle development drive when I was so active here a few years back). Like I said elsewhere, a bad power supply killed many of my backup drives (good reason to archive to DVD I guess).

So yeah, modeling clay and epoxy sound a lot less dangerous at this point...

[knc1]

Naw....
This is a measure once, cut as many times as necessary project.

Edit:
Having slept on the problem . . . .
It will be a mold once, cast many times type of project.

I'll make some tooling that allows me to mold a flat spot into the top edge of the case similar to the one Amazon puts on the bottom edge for their connectors.

At least I will if the case plastic can be (heat) stretched that far.

I have some non-repairable Kindles whose case's can be volunteered for test cases (pun intended).
Hopefully Amazon will not have made any major changes in the compounding of the case plastic over the years.

(That otherwise useless summer job in a plastic's shop may come in handy here.)

[knc1]

Plan A (above).

[thomass]

Maybe another donation thread to award the coder of the next jailbreak? (for the current fws)?

[knc1]

Originally Posted by knc1

Plan A (above).

Continuing (making tools to make the tooling to make the ...)

NiLuJe's VoiceView dongle arrived yesterday evening.

Now this project is just waiting on me to finish the serial port modification and ship everything to France.

[Yourcat]

A tri-d printer would do the job in a few minutes. Deformation of the plastic also sounds promising. Good luck!

I wonder why one would spend time on the OTG / audio dongle. Amazon releases some crap and keeps you busy - at the end of the day no-one will use it.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by Yourcat

A tri-d printer would do the job in a few minutes. Deformation of the plastic also sounds promising. Good luck!

I wonder why one would spend time on the OTG / audio dongle. Amazon releases some crap and keeps you busy - at the end of the day no-one will use it.

It is the inside of the edge curve that needs to be flatten out -
I.E: reduce the radius of the edge curve on the inside (by about 1/16 of an inch).
The outside of the curve, the bottom, and the top side are a "don't care" (other than as a matter of appearance).

But people do use USBnetworking.
It is the conflict between USBnetworking and VoiceView that needs to be found and fixed.

(That information is hidden inside of the spoiler of the first post.)

Amazon released the Oasis -
You don't see anyone wasting their time on that product mistake (at least not until they cut the price in half).

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by knc1

It is the conflict between USBnetworking and VoiceView that needs to be found and fixed.

I also experienced a conflict between VoiceView and USB mass storage, so I hope amazon will eventually notice that problem and fix it with their own firmware update. But even then it might not fix the conflict with USBnet, which may need to be a bit smarter in its assumptions made when swapping USB gadgets.

It is possible that the problem described is caused by a generic USB dongle, in some OTG device detection code, so perhaps NiLuJe may benefit from a generic sound dongle (which I offered in a PM, in request for a shipping address) as well. However, a quick viewing of the USBnet scripts shows that they could use some updates to prevent "bit-rot" in USB gadget handling logic, and that alone may fix the conflict between VoiceView and USBnet.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Yourcat

A tri-d printer would do the job in a few minutes. Deformation of the plastic also sounds promising. Good luck!

I wonder why one would spend time on the OTG / audio dongle. Amazon releases some crap and keeps you busy - at the end of the day no-one will use it.

Well since there are many no-ones, I do believe the guys are doing a good thing.

How do you know that it won't be used?
Proof of this?
I can't say one way or the other since my crystal ball broke.

[knc1]

For those who might be interested, here is what your Kindle's case is made of:
http://www.matbase.com/material-cate...d-pc-gf30.html

[Yourcat]

@Cini: Without TTS enabled books it makes little sense. OTG is not mainstream and I guess it never will be.
Bluetooth sound would be interesting.
Luckily my crystal ball is fine