[M96] Any way to map hardware buttons to actions?

[machinogodzilla]

Here is what I want. At the bottom of M96 there is a rocker switch for the volume selection. It's pretty useless to me most of the time and sits there gathering dust.

I would like to use it for turning the scribble mode in Onyx Neo Reader on/off (say, volume up) and for turning the eraser mode on/off (volume down), or whatever other function I feel the need for.

I've never seen any mention of such feature on this forum before (the search doesn't show much) so it may be that this belongs to the feature request section but asking doesn't hurt.

Also, I would probably not need that feature if one could customise the status bar in the software. But that's most definitely is a feature request as I can't see any way to do it. Seems like it's time to learn writing Android apps...

[franzli]

I'm not sure if this is the same on the m96, but on the t68 there is a button in the status bar that you can switch to have the buttons on the right act as page turn or as volume buttons. I would suspect that this might control the behavior of the volume rocker on the m96.
More elaborate remapping of functions is trickier, and i think to have the buttons act differently in different programmes you'd need to actually implement that in the app -which would probably only work if it's open source? Some apps allow you to do some remapping of the volume buttons (ezpdf reader can use the for scrolling).

Another possibility is to remap the buttons globally, but that should be handled with care as you might lose functionality (e.g. of you remap the menu button this way you lose the ability to force a refresh with long press).
If you're rooted, use a file manager like es file manager to Mount the system partition as rewritable (rw) and have a look at the files in /system/usr/keylayout/. There is a file generic.kl and several others, on of which should be named something about buttons or physical buttons. If you have a look in these two files (i think the second one should be more relevant for your case), you can look for volume up and volume down and try swapping that for a different function. Make sure to have a backup of the original file in case anything goes wrong!

[machinogodzilla]

Hi franzli, unfortunately the reader is not rooted but thanks for the tips. I can't root it right now but that time will come...

The sort of answer I was hoping for was that there is some Android macro app that can detect and identify the hardware key presses and assign them to custom actions like tapping and dragging. So that when I press the volume rocker it does the digging through the menus and tapping for me.

I've noticed that the macro apps also require root (sigh!)... Anyway, regardless root or not if someone knows an app that can do what I want on the reader a pointer to it would be appreciated.

[machinogodzilla]

Originally Posted by franzli

More elaborate remapping of functions is trickier, and i think to have the buttons act differently in different programmes you'd need to actually implement that in the app -which would probably only work if it's open source?

Not sure if there is a way to modify Onyx Neo Reader. There is some plugin API but it could be for the apparently upcoming new reader. I have also found something that appears to be a working Onyx Android SDK. I run a simple check with it to detect if a device was an eink kind and it worked fine. A quick search has not revealed anything to do with the buttons, though, maybe it's not exposed through the API.

Perhaps the best thing is to ask at the source and see what Onyx say.