Mad Scientist's Lair: tablet

Showing posts with label tablet. Show all posts

Cracked Screen

Disaster hath struck:

I've been running my tablets "naked" (shorthand for without a screen protector) and it's finally taken a toll.

How it happened: The Note was balanced right on the edge of stability on the table edge. A small nudge sent it flipping over and it landed flat, face down, on a tile floor.

Interestingly, I've dropped the Nook 3-4 times now, and its screen is still in perfect condition. I think there are two main differences here;

The Nook has a smaller screen, so for a given thickness of glass the aspect ratio (diagonal to thickness) is smaller for the smaller screen, providing added strength.
The Nook impacts have all been at an angle and not face-on.

Repair: I always like to do things myself, but after watching a few videos on removing the screen on YouTube, I opted to find some professionals with some more experience. The screen replacement cost $130, about half as much as I had initially purchased the tablet for on ebay (ouch!). The screen repair shop I went to was very professional though - they had obviously done this before (they had 2-3 Note's sitting in various stages of disrepair) and had a good turn-around time of four days (including the weekend).

The one down-side is that they weren't able to source the dark-gray screen, so the front of my tablet is now white:

But it works mostly as well as before! The new digitizer works well with the pen - it's responsive and there are no dead-zones. But there are a couple of new dead-zones for touch (right where the spacebar / web navigation tab is in portrait mode. Unfortunately, that is really annoying spot for a dead zone. Still it works, and works well enough.

Guess it's time to invest in a case.

Weekend (tech) Project: Building CM11

I finally decided to dive into the deep end and compile Android from source!

This is not a complete how-to post. I'm writing this first to help you troubleshoot your own build and show where you might run into trouble. Primarily, though it's my notes for the next time I build.

Building:

First off, I'm building this in Ubuntu. Also, this is going to use some hard disk space. Make sure that at least 37 (more safely 40) GB is available. I didn't have quite this much available on my linux partition, so I plugged in my external HDD. You have to make sure that you have read-write-execute permissions to the mounted drive. The easiest way I found to do this is to use;

sudo umount /media/madscientist/MyExternalHDDsudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sd** /media/madscientist

You need to fill in the **. This can be found be finding where the device is located in /dev. You can do this with the command;

sudo fdisk -l

From here on out, I'm following the instructions at;
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Build_for_encore
with backup from this thread;
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1370873

Before you run envsetup and breakfast, you need to add a file, here's the description:

Have you set up your local manifest file to use the NookieDevs repo? If not, here is one that will work. This goes in the file [source directory]/.repo/local_manifests/roomservice.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest>
<project name="NookieDevs/android_device_bn_encore" path="device/bn/encore" remote="github" revision="cm-11.0" />
<project name="CyanogenMod/android_kernel_bn_encore" path="kernel/bn/encore" remote="github" revision="encore-omap3-3.0.y" />
</manifest>

After this, you may need to re-run repo sync.

Okay, now my nook isn’t showing up on usb. Trying to find adb_usb.ini to edit as per;
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Doc:_adb_intro#.22Device_not_found.22_errors
Finally, I found the file in; ~/.android/adb_usb.ini and could add the code: 0x2080

With this done, I restarted the adb server (adb kill-server, adb start-server).
You'll have to answer a dialog on the nook to confirm that the computer is allowed to run usb debugging. With this done I was able to attach to the debugger.

(Another useful site for nook usb info is here; http://nookdevs.com/NookColor_USB_ADB)

This allowed me to run;

~/Build/android/system/device/bn/encore$ ./extract-files.sh

Which requires that you already have cm 10.2 or later installed on the nook. This pulls some hardware information from the nook for building.

Then you can run the build as normal. From here on out I didn't have a problem building.

Installing:

Before you install, you ABSOLUTELY MUST back up your existing ROM. This makes it so very much easier to get back to a working state if something goes wrong. Like having an out-of-date recovery image....

When installing the build I encountered a “Build failed status 7” as per this thread
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=47672324&postcount=353

This was because the recovery image was out of date. To install the latest recovery image, I followed the directions from http://nookdevs.com/CWR_Manual_Installation in which you’ll need to mount and copy some files over via adb. Here's the dump of my command line history:

adb shell mount -o rw,remount /
adb shell mkdir /boot
adb shell mount /dev/block/mmcblk0p1 /boot
adb shell mv /boot/uRecImg /boot/uRecImg.stock
adb shell mv /boot/uRecRam /boot/uRecRam.stock
adb push /buildpath/android/system/out/target/product/encore/kernel /boot/uRecImg
adb push /buildpath/android/system/out/target/product/encore/ramdisk-recovery.ub /boot/uRecRam

This brought me to CWM-based recovery v6.0.4.6, which looks promising as google seems to associate this with CM11.

This worked - CM11 was up and running!

Grab the latest gapps from CM’s website (http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Google_Apps) and you're done!

Weekend Project: Tablet Stand

I added a new tablet to the family, and thought that it was about time I came up with a stand so I could use them while typing. So with a bit of scrap wood and a few quick cuts I was able to whip one up in no time. It works great for both the Galaxy Note 10.1 and for the Nook Color. The stand is only about 4.5 in long and very lightweight. Here's the story;