It’s been more than a year since this tablet pc. I didn’t have much use for it until… Well, I decided that it would go nicely into the car to serve as a GPS navigator and a voicebox using my NetTTS software. And I decided to get a better tablet for everyday usage instead.
So, there go the first bunch of hacks, that solve the issues I’ve encountered.
I found the kernel sources for the tablet here, that makes it a very good embedded pc, with mostly all the usual linux stuff (Except for the opengles drivers). However, for the sake of using svox TTS synth I decided to leave the android froyo there. Besides, there are some good GPS apps there, so let it be android (Actually, all GPS navigation software is utter crap, but I can’t take a luxury to write my own one, so let’s chew the cactus)
The first bug that needed to be solved was the missing ttsservices.apk. Googling for it and installing into the system made svox happy and my netts app worked out of the box.
Second issue required some soldering to be done.
In the end solution I’m doing, I need full control of reset and poweron of the device. Since it is merely a frontend, I would like to keep it offline, while a different linux-powered node will handle the rest of the stuff and poweron it on demand. By powered down I meen fully powered down. Not in suspend. So I needed to wire the reset and power-on lines somewhere outside, without actually screwing up the casing.
So, time to disassemble. And have a good look around. There are lots of test pads, and the uart ones really worth mentioning with the obligatory pic
See TX and RX pads? They are regular 3.3v ttl, you’ll need them for u-boot console and stuff. But not in my case.
The power-on button drives the corresponding pin high for a moment and has a test pad right nearby. The reset pin is “0” when the device is off, “1” when on, and driving it to “0” turns the device off. (All stuff 3.3v) With this knowledge and a transistor we can: turn it on, off, reset and know the device state. Just what I need.
And even more luck this time – The RJ45 connector had 2 of the pins totally unconnected. So a little soldering and voila:
Next, I need to implant a hub and a bluetooth module, that requires some module compilation VooDoo, so it’s a subject of a different post.