Random Screensaver Image

[anyone]

Ok looking forward to the transparency support then. Thanks.

Also the image flickers a lot while being set, is that normal? Maybe I Should reduce color depth, its at 24 bit right now.

Actually if the device is off it still shows the standard "off"-screen, I thought this would work for both.

[frostschutz]

Which device are you using?

The image should not flicker "a lot", does not for me on my H2O. But then I am using simple black and white images, not full blown color. At least on my H2O the dithering for color images sucks, I get better quality reducing color to 16 shades of grey beforehand.

I updated the attachment in the first post, it removes the whiteout so the "short image" idea might work for you now.

[anyone]

H2O too, 16bit grayscale photo. But if the Kobo only displays 16 shades I guess i should reduce that.

[frostschutz]

And which firmware version? Everything seems fine here with H2O on 3.15.x/3.16.x

3.13 should work even better, but ... I can no longer easily test since I can't up and downgrade firmwares all the time. I should prepare a different SD card for each firmware version I guess, but so far it was not worth the effort.

The bit-ness of the PNG should not matter, everything is converted to the framebuffer colorspace anyways, only the eink driver will do its own calculations from there since in the end you only get 16 greys. (#000, #111, #222, #333, #444, ... #fff)

[anyone]

Firmware is 3.15

Reducing the image to 16 shades didn't help, still flickers and while turning the device off it froze in the flicker and displayed only part of it. But the 1MB image got down to 300kb, so no reason to store data that cant be displayed anyway.

Using a shorter image keeps the status text visible now, thanks.

[frostschutz]

Oh, I see. I never noticed the flickering before because all my images were black-white. Apparently the eInk driver handles those differently than full color. How curious. I will see what I can do to improve things.

[frostschutz]

The current version should help with the flickering issue and it introduces limited transparency support: pixels that are fully transparent in the PNG image won't be updated. However 1% or 10% transparency will be drawn as if it weren't transparent at all so you can't do nice gradient blur effects. However it should suffice for cutting out the exact region where it says "Sleeping" or "Power Off".

[anyone]

I'm still having troubles with partially displays images. Also often when awaking out of standby the touch function isn't responding anymore until I restart the device. Uninstalled this mod and so far it seems ok.

[frostschutz]

I can understand partially displayed images, it happens to me too (but only very rarely). It happens because this mod can not know when exactly nickel will display the Sleep/Poweroff status image so ... even though the mod checks three times (over the course of 2+ seconds) whether the image is displayed correctly, it still might not succeed.

Not sure what else to do about it, short of providing a config file that lets you finetune the timings yourself. The mod can't keep trying to display images indefinitely, or it will end up showing the sleep image only after the device wakes up from standby... which would be kind of worse.

As for touch no longer working that issue baffles me; this mod no longer affects touch in any way. Before switching to pngshow it did so indirectly by using pickel showpic which changes the display rotation around...

[anyone]

Maybe it has to do with me also having koreader and a boot menu installed. Or I just got lucky so far after uninstalling the display mod after all it's kind of a random problem. I will test a little while longer.

[uncorposenzatest]

Hi everyone, just arrived here.
I just got an Aura, that in Italy is branded by "Mondadori".

The hack worked perfectly (my firmware is 3.15).
The right size for the Aura screen is 758*1024 and i made some very simple images with photoshop, exporting them as png with 16 grays; the hack works perfectly along with the editing of affiliate.conf changing affiliate=Mondadori to affiliate=Kobo (note that change this file made my kobo begin using the cover of the book i was reading as the screensaver, so i had to remove that flag in the settings).

[anyone]

Ok the touch bug is still there even without your mod, time to reset the device I guess.

[frostschutz]

Originally Posted by anyone

Ok the touch bug is still there even without your mod, time to reset the device I guess.

Thanks for reporting back.

I don't have this problem. The closest I got in trying to reproduce is this:

If you touch the display as the reader is going to sleep. Only after it is asleep (give it a few more secs, it's still awake for a short while) let go the display. And then wake it up using the power button. Then the first time you touch the display it does not register.

Or rather, it does register, but as a swipe motion, it becomes visible in Sketchpad. I touched it in the lower left corner before sleep. Then tapped the upper right corner after wake up. And Sketchpad draws a straight line between those two points.

From the software point of view, the touchscreen is kind of like a keyboard. Touching the screen is like pressing a key. Letting go of the screen happens while the device is asleep and thus does not register. So on wakeup the software still believes it's being pressed. When you touch it again, it does not register you pressing the key, it just registers the new coordinates, and you letting go of the key. Thus you get this giant swipe in a perfect line.

None of that should stop the screen from working altogether, though.

[frostschutz]

Since I have another report that this doesn't work on a Glo HD...

- any Glo HD users using this screensaver successfully?

- any Glo HD user with telnet, if you do logread -f, what does it show when going to sleep?

I really need to find a more reliable way to hook into this...

[frostschutz]

For some reason nickel executes dd before going to sleep (or power off). So an alternative method would be to hook into dd, and then look at the display. This is easy if you restrict yourself to a single line of pixels. So you can make a single line pattern that matches the Sleeping and Poweroff screens respectively. It would be an alternative approach to screensaver for devices that don't work with the current method, and in case the log message method breaks entirely in the future (it seems the message I originally used is not coming back).

Problems with this approach, however, are several:

- needs a different pattern for each device/resolution/language, so there must be a (simple?) way for users to come up with these patterns by themselves

- timing. at the time dd is called it's not yet showing the sleeping/poweroff screen. That appears 0.x seconds afterwards. Then you only have a short time until the device is actually asleep or off and the magic has to happen in between

timing already is an issue with the current incarnation of the script.

On the upside this approach might make it possible to have different images for sleeping and poweroff states.