Supply and demand? I can’t find it for less than $35.
A step-by-step tutorial would be appreciated.
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Still not bad, considering the original msrp was $349 
In the first post.
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Summary
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Cool. I never knew this option was in the forum to hide text like this.
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This looks awesome @mattmon! Nice work!
That display looks similar to the Android Things running Lenovo Smart Displays that can have their boot loaders unlocked. Do you know if there’s a way to run your Rom or something similar on that hardware or is it too different?
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The Lenovo smart displays are based on a mediatek SoC, so this rom isn’t compatible.
I do have a few of the displays you linked. The android things builds are somewhat less feature complete, making ROM hacking a little tedious.
I may have something for you soon, but first working to liberate the T6E.
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Thanks! I’ll wait to see what you have in the works before buying any of these (I have 4 or 5 of the Smart Displays already).
Thanks for the correction!
Was able to connect and run the adb commands and I eventually got it working. Still was getting the password error, so I just entered the incorrect password until the system “wiped itself” and then was able to set it up with HA companion app and some other goodies.
The tablet OS takes some getting used to, I was stuck in an app for way longer than I care to admit 
Thanks again, now to add some additional apps and set this system set up in tablet / kiosk mode!
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Interesting. Every unit I’ve flashed doesn’t ask for a password, but just informs it’s incorrect and proceeds with the wipe.
Not a big issue, glad you figured it out, thanks for posting your findings!
Adding some zeros to the user data partition during flashing will probably avoid this.
Also, I edited the install procedure to more prominently suggest installing the included nav bar… I left it out of the default rom as I figured most people would deploy these as a kiosk.
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Wow this is amazing! I was able to secure an Avaya Vantage 3 K175 some time ago, but they are incredibly hard to find (so I only have one). These are amazingly cheap by comparison. No PoE or fully-functional Play Services Android out-of-the-box by comparison, but I’ll take it for the price!
Definitely no need for a full guide, but may you roughly outline how you build these ROMs from scratch–particularly things specific to this device? I can’t find that info easily on XDA. I’m a bit paranoid downloading Android ROMs. I would love to do it myself and them put it into a GitHub Action for both transparency and easy forking/modification/building for anyone!
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I pinky swear that I didn’t put anything nefarious in the rom, 
If you care to investigate, you will see that all the critical system apks have their factory signatures intact.
As far as what I did, not really a whole lot.
- Anything Microsoft or Lenovo got removed.
- HA themed bits and app stores got added.
- Chromium webview was built with “com.google.android” package name
- spoofing applied via haystack
The link to @deadman96385’s thread on XDA in credits contains full instructions to do this yourself (more or less).
The only way this rom differs from those instructions is that it doesn’t use a systemless root solution. It being a user debug rom variant, this wasn’t required.
It should be fully possible to get modern AOSP running on this device, it seems any further development effort would be better spent on that.
So many thanks for the ROM and this thread! Today my brand-new Lenovo arrived here in Europe - of course with shipping & taxes it ended up higher in price but zero regrets, the build quality is really amazing!
When working my way through the installation manual, there are several items where I please ask for a little bit more details, especially:
- "a flash tool that supports qualcomm’s firehose/sahara protocols, like bkeerler’s edl " - what exactly do I have to download? Going to Release 3.52 · bkerler/edl · GitHub I have loaded the code, unpacked it but how do I execute?
- “android SDK tools” going here SDK Platform release notes | Android Studio | Android Developers I don’t find a download link?
- “start the flash tool with the provided xml files” my first problem is: I don’t get EDL started
so once I get it started, how do I tell EDL to use the files in the 7z file?
Sorry for the beginner’s questions, this is my first touchpoint with Android.
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I haven’t decided to do this myself yet but this is what I’d say to your questions:
- Follow the Gihub repo instructions. In summary, you need to install Python 3.9 and prep the library.
- Those are most likely the Android Platform Tools that will allow you to get into the guts of Android devices.
- The way to point edl to the files:
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EDL is distributed as source code - you need to compile it.
The procedure to do so will depend on your host platform.
As far as android sdk tools, all you really need is the adb binary. However the SDK is an easy way to get that installed and setup properly.
EDL is able to find the image files via the command line arguments.
- rawprogram.xml defines the destination partition for each image
- “flash/“ dictates the location of the image files on disk and corresponds with the extracted archive.
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Hi, great job!
I stuck at first point: Download - where?
When I do:
./edl qfil bin/rawprogram.xml bin/patch0.xml flash/ --loader=bin/prog_emmc_firehose_8953_ddr.mb
I get:
sahara - [LIB]: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'bin/prog_emmc_firehose_8953_ddr.mb'
Can you help me?
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I made a typo in the original post. The correct command is:
./edl qfil bin/rawprogram.xml bin/patch0.xml flash/ --loader=bin/prog_emmc_firehose_8953_ddr.mbn
Note the trailing “n”.
Pressing the tab key also would have solved this for you 
At $20 each I’d be crazy not to stock up on these. Have any videos of them in action? I’d like to try to replace most of my panels with these if they perform well (compared to my cheap used Fire tablet 7s).
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it was too late Thx! It’s working!
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Many thanks - from a starters point of view it is sometimes not easy to work through all the stuff that may be pre-existing on others’ computers. So what I did:
- Installled Python from the link in the EDL instructions
- Installed git
- Installed QC9008 drivers
- Installed UsbDkInstaller
- “Test on device connect using “UsbDkController -n” if you see a device with pid 0x9008” fails as my command line does not find “UsbDkController”
- “fhloaderparse newstuff Loaders” fails as my commandline does not find “fhloaderparse”
- no idea where to put the 7z file so that EDL finds it
Do I need to do all this or just go to the edl directory and execute the command line above?
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thanks so much for this awesome work! currently have a thinksmart en route and have a lenovo smart display at home as well. would love to see if you can get the smart display @rohankapoorcom mentioned going as well.
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