Thanks for the update and all your efforts with this.
It’s really going to open up the possibilities on these Thinksmart devices (and hopefully the smart displays too)
Thanks! I’ll give that a shot!
I really appreciate the work you’re putting in to this. I picked up a few of these after seeing them mentioned in a Reddit post. The one’s I picked up for $39 on Amazon are the Innolux P080DDD-AB2 variants. I was able to load your Postmarket image that didn’t have a touchscreen driver. I’ve also played around with a few of the Android builds. Exciting project! Would love to be able to run Linux natively on it.
Great update thanks
Just a question about using HA on PMOS - as there isn’t a Linux version of fully kiosk (which I love), is there a similar kiosk option that has as many features (such as controlling screen on/off, brightness, audio etc)? Basically, how useable is PMOS with HA?
Firefox has a kiosk mode, though not anywhere near as feature rich as Fully.
You can invoke it from the command line:
./firefox -kiosk http://your-dashboard-url
Maybe have a look at @zhbjsh’s ssh integration to help fill in the gaps.
Edit: chromium also has the --kiosk
flag
You mean the batteries this device lacks?
Ah nice. Would miss the fully functions though. I’m guessing there are other ways to turn the screen off/on?
Almost finished with the Himax touchscreen driver
It works, just needs some more cleanups and I can probably post a test image tonight.
really amazing work on all this Felix! Do I understand you correctly and I need some kind of ‘special’ cable/soldering/breakout board to do the ‘always on’ device mode? Can you tell me what to get so I’ll be able to help you test?
It means it would have to be decided at Kernel compile time whether you want USB Host mode by default (i.e. without special cable) or if you want USB Device mode.
My thinking was that USB Host mode would probably be the more likely use-case for the normal user because USB Device mode is only really useful for debugging. In that case you’d only need a special cable if you want the device to show up as a networking device for postmarketOS debugging.
I’ll include that in the testing image tonight.
Unfortunately, some recent changes on the Kernel have broken the way USB OTG works on this SoC.
So the testing image must wait until I get that sorted out…
I’m sure there are better ways, but to start I found that critical notifications will turn the screen back on. I have the wyoming-satellite working pretty well now (with local openwakeword). Added this to the startup command:
--detection-command "notify-send -u critical wakeup"
A minor downside is a bunch of stacked up notifications. Tried using --replace-id
to keep it to one, but then only the first one wakes the screen.
I’m using the regular screen blanking to turn it back off, although I had to disable is-alsa-playing
in /etc/sleep-inhibitor.conf
for that to work while wyoming is running.
Couldn’t get the USB stuff to work tonight, so I’ll just publish a version that at least has something for the Himax folks to test:
pmos-lenovo-cd-18781y-testing-20240422.tar.xz
As per usual, username pmos
, password 1234
.
Note that you will want to flash the version of lk2nd that comes with this release to boot
. Otherwise the Himax touchscreen driver will not be enabled in Linux.
This version has all the changes mentioned in the previous update: WiFi stability improvements, increased availability of RAM. I also implemented the cap at 177MHz (default is 200 MHz) for the SDIO bus that the downstream kernel has in place. It seems the Himax variant needs it, otherwise the WiFi card randomly disappears. Unfortunately it also shaves off almost 100Mbit/s in my iperf3 tests. But 160 MBit/s is still good enough on this device for me. I certainly prefer stability over max throughput here, especially since the device has comparatively tiny storage
USB OTG might not work at all on this release, but the USB Gadget (i.e. ethernet device showing up) works. Tested this both on the Focaltech and Himax variant (courtesy of @mattmon, thanks again!) and it works fine on both.
On the Himax variant you may want to go in to the display settings and switch the scaling to 125% and then back to 100% to resolve the weird scaling issue.
Let me know how testing goes
I don’t expect any weirdness from the Himax touch driver, as it is rather simple and doesn’t actually do that much other than pulling a few bytes over the I2C bus.
Out of interest, do you use the same tools to flash as the Android ROMs or something else?
Hi
It is some new version of alternative FW for this tablet ? How i can flash it ?
This new image is definitely working on the Himax models, although it still has some weird scaling issues; it looks like it defaults to 200% and some spillover still happens at the lock screen until after you turn it down.
Has your git repo for pmbootstrap been updated yet? I’m itching to make another SXMO image to try on these (I had sound issues with my last one, exacerbated by frequently-dropping WiFi).
Excellent work so far and thank you so much!
Yes, with the files from my releases it’s usually simply:
edl w boot lk2nd.img
edl w userdata lenovo-cd-18781y-rootfs.img
This is a Linux based firmware. Not Android based, so no Android apps will function on this. For flashing instructions, see above.
Yeah, this seems to be a Phosh bug.
Just pushed the latest changes to my repo. It might be a bit messy as it’s still a work in progress, so I rebase and force push a lot at the moment. Sorry for that. I’m getting very close to having this upstreamed into pmOS properly
Thanks for testing!
Thanks for that - I just got it flashed and working. Really impressed so far Thanks for your hard work, much appreciated. Playing a bit more now…
I see a few issues and wonder if this expected or you have seen:
- Display scaling - didn’t seem to persist after I set 100% although after a couple of tries, it seems to have stuck to 100%
- I can’t seem to delete an apps. In ‘software’ I get an error EDIT: restarted and the error is: Message recipient disconnected from message bus without replying
- keyboard is quite small and doesn’t take up the available horizontal space. It’s usable but a little tricky (maybe a double Jack Daniels would help steady my fingers!)
- Firefox as installed is very buggy graphically with boxes appearing and screen corruption. Tab headers are sometimes at the top, sometimes at the bottom. Seems a bit all over the place.
I really like it though - lots of promise
Any thoughts on these? Thanks.