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Old 09-21-2018, 03:42 AM   #1
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USBMS Shenanigans...

So, I may have been playing a bit the past several days...

I've been trying to see what I can get away with behind Nickel's back, without actually having to kill Nickel. This was born from ideas from kobo-rclone, but I wanted to push things further.

So after some experimentation, getting sidetracked and creating an onscreen keyboard using FBInk (oops...), and many device reboots, I'm finally starting to get something that is faintly approaching stability. I will note that my H2O has carried on like a trooper, although it's probably wondering if there is a Union to join...

Where I'm at currently is I can switch into USBMS mode, remount the internal memory partition (to a different mountpoint, just in case), and crucially, enable WiFi.

Once there, one can do what one wishes to do without having to kill Nickel. Touch input even becomes viable (I may have written a touch driver to go along with the onscreen keyboard). I finally figured out today, that Nickel appears to kill the touch screen after a few seconds in USBMS mode. HOWEVER, not if the Wifi gets re-enabled, which makes me wonder if there is a link somewhere.

This was all done in Go.

Here's a screenshot of what I currently have:
Click image for larger version

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ID:	166418

I just thought you folks might be interested. I've got plans for this. PLANS I say
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Old 09-21-2018, 08:27 AM   #2
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Old 09-21-2018, 12:09 PM   #3
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Very interesting!
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Old 09-21-2018, 12:21 PM   #4
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.

The touch input status in USBMS mode *might* be H2O and/or zforce specific: I know I've had to forcibly re-enable it on wakeup in KOReader, because it sometimes failed to wake-up on its own.

On the off-chance you don't actually need WiFi, you can check if the same trick works there:

Code:
echo "a" > /sys/devices/virtual/input/input1/neocmd

Last edited by NiLuJe; 09-21-2018 at 12:27 PM.
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Old 09-21-2018, 03:50 PM   #5
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Nice work sherman, Did you modified stock shell scripts or found a way to hook your code inside nickel?
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Old 09-21-2018, 04:31 PM   #6
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Nice work sherman, Did you modified stock shell scripts or found a way to hook your code inside nickel?
Currently launching via SSH/telnet. Programs that will be distributed could be launched via KFMON.

As far as bringing up Wifi, am currently replicating what the Koreader folks have done in their enable/disable wifi shell scripts.

The screenshot in the OP was just an example test program to bring the three parts, or libraries together. That is the entering/leaving USBMS mode, the on-screen keyboard, and the touch stuff.

The idea is that potential devs can pick and choose the required components.

The goal is not to create a complete GUI toolkit, or anything like that. Rather, to provide a simple means of say letting the user input a password or some other info that might be required.

The original question really was, how much can I get away with without killing Nickel?
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Old 09-21-2018, 04:49 PM   #7
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The original question really was, how much can I get away with without killing Nickel?
On the good old days you can pause/resume nickel with killall -STOP/killall -CONT, at some point on FW3.x the trick didn't work (nickel kept polling for events and other programs can't see these inputs)

I am really interested on your research
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Old 09-21-2018, 04:54 PM   #8
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@pazos: Good point, I can't actually remember on which FW I was the last time I tried that, but I did indeed resort to that for a while when debugging both KFMon & KOReader .

EDIT: Apparently quite a while ago . According to the FW grid that was 3.19 at the very latest. I remember committing that patch some time (possible quite a bit, actually) after having last used it, so, take that with a grain of salt...

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Old 09-21-2018, 05:09 PM   #9
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I'm probably not going to do much more "research" on capabilities so to speak, I think I've figured out enough that I can do what I want now.

The drive for all of this is for applications which download ebook content. In this situation, doing stuff in USBMS mode means that Nickel will import your content when you leave USBMS mode.

And with the additions NiLuJe has added to FBInk, one can detect when Nickel has finished importing content too. Which opens up further possibilities.

All of this would not have been possible without the prior work done by the Koreader team, and other Kobo devs. All credit goes to them really.
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Old 09-25-2018, 12:26 PM   #10
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Is the code anywhere on GitHub, I'm really interested to see how this was implemented in Go
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Old 09-25-2018, 05:00 PM   #11
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Is the code anywhere on GitHub, I'm really interested to see how this was implemented in Go
Not yet, but it will be!

I'm still not sure how stable it really is, and won't really know until I integrate it into a project (which I have such a project in the works). When I'm a bit more sure it's not going to corrupt things, I will be releasing it.

Basically, all three components (USBMS, touch input handling, onscreen-keyboard) are very much still alpha level.
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Old 09-25-2018, 06:37 PM   #12
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Basically, all three components (USBMS, touch input handling, onscreen-keyboard) are very much still alpha level.
I want to know how are you able to read the touchscreen with nickel running.

About alpha quality, I have a couple of "tethered" devices available for testing.
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Old 09-25-2018, 07:43 PM   #13
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I want to know how are you able to read the touchscreen with nickel running.

About alpha quality, I have a couple of "tethered" devices available for testing.
When waiting for a touch event, I simply open '/dev/input/event1' and read whatever it spits out (a Linux 'input_event' struct). It's then just a matter of decoding the "event packets" into a set of usable coordinates. No guaranteeing I have that final bit completely correct, as each Kobo device does it different...

This works especially well in USBMS mode (so long as you can keep the touch screen awake), as there are no on-screen Nickel controls to interfere with.

If you folk are happy with alpha level software, I'll upload what I have to Github. Beware, the USBMS stuff is a hot mess of C, mixed with Go (using cgo), and a few calls to external programs for good measure. It ain't pretty, but sorta seems to work. I welcome any help in refining it.
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Old 09-28-2018, 04:01 AM   #14
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Ok, finally got around to putting this all up on Github. The projects are the following:

kobo-sim-usb
go-kobo-input
go-osk

Not the most memorable of names, but hey...

[EDIT: and sorry it's all a bit bare-bones. I just wanted to get something uploaded for you folks]

Last edited by sherman; 09-28-2018 at 04:07 AM.
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Old 11-16-2023, 08:35 PM   #15
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Ok, finally got around to putting this all up on Github. The projects are the following:

kobo-sim-usb
go-kobo-input
go-osk

Not the most memorable of names, but hey...

[EDIT: and sorry it's all a bit bare-bones. I just wanted to get something uploaded for you folks]
This software was much appreciated Sherman, forming the basis of a slick new keyboard I have renamed "oskansi". (That way my kludges shall not sully the original good name!)
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