Think this is the best place, since I’m not asking for configuration help…because I can’t configure it, stuck on old software.
I recently got one, promptly rooted it to poke around. It seems like it’d be able to handle wyoming-satellite but probably not openwakeword, would love to be proved wrong.
Running pretty old software, about 8+ years old at this point, makes developing for it tricky. Runs Yocto Rocko, but it needs a custom hardware layer to be properly configured; using machine type as arm will only give usable binaries if they are 100% statically linked; anything else needs the libraries yocto generates (and don’t replace the ones already on the doppler, else you’ll test your unbricking skills). I’ve gotten a bit further using buildroot-2017-11 on a debian 9 machine, binaries will run (static and dynamically linked). I’m not a developer though, so it’s slow going.
I would love a backup of someone’s root partition who’s running the latest software (or at least something that has local control).
I will try to write a howto later (my first attempt at rooting was way too messy, for one thing you only need to remove one speaker and not disassemble the whole danged thing), but here’s the basic rundown (not responsible if you brick your doppler, if these instructions are too vague then don’t attempt):
Turn it upside down, remove the (to you) left speaker grill and four screws holding the speaker in. There’s a small motherboard with the SOC on it, toward the front you’ll see the RX TX and GRND connection points. I had the most success with making a good connection there and plugging/unplugging from the usb device on the computer. The doppler will NOT boot while it’s fully connected, so just plug it in, have minicom or whatever running on your pc with it connected to the doppler, then quickly remove the ground wire and reconnect while hitting a key so you can interrupt uboot. Once there change the bootcmd to get into single user mode. Set a root passwd. Reboot (will probably need to cut/restore power to the doppler), should be able to login normally. Use wget or curl to download a busybox binary so you can start a telnet server (included one does not have that applet for obvious reasons). You can also run dropbear, bit harder to find a working one (look for armv7l for binaries that can run on the doppler). Start it in rc.local, check that it works on reboot, and you shouldn’t need the serial adapter anymore (unless you brick it, which I already have once).
One of the first things I’d do is backup your partitions. Nowhere near enough space to do a local backup, but if you have an ftp server you can backup there. Here’s the command I used:
dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p3 | curl -T - -u username:password ftp://192.168.1.5/part3.img
Partitions are 1-4, 1 is boot, 2 and 3 are root (it’s an A/B config), 4 is data. Wouldn’t be a bad idea once you have a full backup (and verified they work, I mounted the root and data as a regular loopback file) to flash your known working root partition to the backup root; I’ve discovered if you boot into an older version it gets angry and won’t work even when you get it back on the correct root, you have to do a factory reset (and with their servers going down one by one…I wouldn’t want to do that unless necessary).