Lenovo ThinkSmart View ROM/OS Development

Yes I did you have to change the screen zoom to 125% and then change it back to 100% it might take a few trys for it to stick

i cant get this to work at all echo '/home/pmos/wyoming-satellite/script/run \ --name 'thinkSmart Satellite 2' \ --uri 'tcp://0.0.0.0:10700' \ --awake-wav ~/wyoming-satellite/sounds/awake.wav \ --done-wav ~/wyoming-satellite/sounds/done.wav \ --mic-command 'arecord -r 16000 -c 1 -f S16_LE -t raw' \ --snd-command 'aplay -r 22050 -c 1 -f S16_LE -t raw' > /dev/null 2>&1 &' >> ~/.profile

Android ā†” Linux is the comparison youā€™re looking for.

Android for now is still the most stable one, especially 8.1 seems to work very well.

PMOS == Linux, and even though Iā€™m a back fan of linux, it is in a much rougher state.

But biggest question is ā€œit dependsā€, what do you want to do with it? Why did you buy it? If itā€™s just to have a HA dash on a very nice screen - stick to A8.1. If you want some more to tinker with, try A11, PMOS, figure out how to install the rescue images and start the circle all over again :wink:

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Having tried them all out over the last couple of months and having just finally got A11 working, A11 is edging slightly ahead of 8.1 for me - MUCH better (working) audio and A11 fixes an issue I have on all four devices I have running 8.1 where the touchscreen stops responding after some time - well, more like it goes into sleep mode and takes a couple of seconds to respond. Could be any one of many components I guess but itā€™s one of those little annoyances.

A11 has itā€™s issues though and still struggling with something crashing it on boot if WiFi enabled.

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I think you can reduce that from happening if you disable auto connect for your WiFi, granted I still have had it happen. The only problem I have on A11 is wake from sleep. I know you can flip the camera slider to turn it back on, but if you are using the camera is not a great solution. I did fix it (sort of) with browser mod on homeassistant and an automation to turn the screen ā€œoffā€ after a minute.

Yeah, in my testing I have WiFi auto connect disabled and that does let it boot - OR block the device temporarily in my access point. What Iā€™m trying to get to is reliable startup after power cut or a device reboot. I also looked into the Automate app to just connect to WiFi after boot up but very annoyingly, that feature was trashed in android 10+ so even with the app devs workaround, it still doesnā€™t work to connect to an SSID within an automation.

I HAVE had it booting ok with WiFi enabled but something in Fully Kiosk or elsewhere causes it to crash. Certainly setting Fully Kiosk into kiosk mode and auto start causes the problem but other things do too. Maybe some kind of call to the internet as itā€™s starting up causes the problem?

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Hi, thank you for your input, at the end I have chosen A11, the reason is primarily due to readily available tutorial and packages thanks to @fruko post in the ā€œparallelā€ thread

Iā€™m now setting up the kiosk dashboard and see what happens after some time and wife feedbacks :smiley:

Did you try Tasker in combination with Tasker settings (needed for wifi toggling and connecting in Android 10+)?

No not yet. I did read some support posts about it having the same issues (logical) as the API access to the WiFi connection was removed in Android 10 There isnā€™t a free or trial version is there?

I am not sure whether there is a free or trail version of Tasker. I bought the app a few years ago. You need both Tasker and Tasker settings. Tasker is available in play store but Tasker settings isnā€™t because it bypasses the wifi restrictions since Android 10. You need to download it on github.

I havenā€™t tested it on the Thinksmart View yet.

Hi again,

thanks a lot for the update! On Wednesday the EDL-cable arrived, Iā€™m now back up using the rescue tool.

First try: From the stock teams image directly to your partitioning scheme ā†’ nope, only fastboot:

Back to ā€œstock teamsā€, then ā€œstock pmosā€ (let stock pmos boot once :wink: ),

edl r cache cache.img
edl r persist persist.img
edl r misc misc.img
edl r config config.img

putting the images into the folder, then applying your partitioning.

Looks better as those two can be ignored (Lenovo ThinkSmart View ROM/OS Development - #260 by mrhand):

Aaaaaaand fastboot again.

Back to ā€œstock teamsā€, then ā€œstock pmosā€ and manually deleting partitions again (my task had not been finished.) :wink:

Deleted everything from the previous post (including batch 4) - except for batch 3: still booting. :slight_smile: Letā€™s find the culprit whichā€™s deletion is messing everything up, so 1-by-1 again:

Batch 3:
edl e cmnlib ā†’ not booting! :angry:
edl e cmnlibbak
edl e cmnlib64
edl e cmnlib64bak
edl e keymaster ā†’ not booting! :angry:
edl e keymasterbak

Phew. Alltogether those six partitions are about 6MB. Maybe the best way is to leave them intact and just stick with them, so as a summary, the following partitions are save to be removed:

edl e vendor
edl e keystore
edl e config
edl e oem
edl e limits
edl e mota
edl e dip
edl e mdtp
edl e syscfg
edl e mcfg
edl e lksecapp
edl e lksecappbak
edl e apdp
edl e msadp
edl e dpo
edl e logdump
edl e resource

Thatā€™s it for today. Tomorrow Iā€™ll have a second look at your second post, @mrhand. (Lenovo ThinkSmart View ROM/OS Development - #335 by mrhand)

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the onboard keyboard ā€œkā€ key dont work

is it easy to swap back between a11 and pmos? I have an older version pmos running right now (and itā€™s working apart from the resolution bug) but I never took a dump. should I do that now with the mostly working version of pmos before trying A11?

Iā€™ve swapped between testing PMOS and A8.1/A11 multiple times and itā€™s worked fine (mostly) but this is always doing a start from scratch install, Iā€™ve not done the dump thing (although I probably should).

The one issue I was stuck on for many weeks was trying to install A11. With the Android Go ROM files as supplied by deadman, it crashed every time on boot (to the Lenovo logo). In the end, I tried something crazy and took one of the stock ROM file sets and copied over the A11 files. This meant no missing files during the flash and it actually worked. Something was obviously missing for me but I didnā€™t do much more testing as to what.

Not sure if that helps at all with your question but I thought worth mentioning if anyone else stumbles across this issue.

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For the love of god I need help!!!

I have never rooted android before and everything I found on how to do this is no longer up to date and leads to dead ends, dead sites or incomplete information.

Does anyone have directions that are easy to follow to get this thing working?

Thank you so much

I just started, so my experience is REALLY limited.
I used this link to setup A11

ATM the thing is a bit unstable and sometimes it hangs on lenovo splash screen during boot. Iā€™m investigating the issueā€¦but I have not much spare time to experimentā€¦

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this helped so much thank you

A new batch of ThinkSmarts, courtesy of @mattmon has made it to my house to compensate for some losses I had attempting some more involved hardware mods :stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks so much, again @mattmon!

Quick pmOS update:
New testing image for those who want to do a fresh install. Kernel is now 6.9.1 and USB OTG should work again, but other than that not much has changed.

Unfortunately, I wasnā€™t able to make USB OTG be the default mode. postmarketOS gets a bit bent out of shape if USB OTG is enabled by default upon boot and the USB gadget mode (i.e. network via USB) is not configured and enabled. So switching between the two is not possible in this scenario and nothing is really gained.

So, to enable USB OTG right now you need to pull pin B8 on the USB-C controller to GND (I somehow felt thatā€™s probably safer than blasting 5V into B8 (GPIO5)).
You can make your own cable using some solderable USB-C connectors which works great, but more often I end up using this USB-C passthrough breakout board (itā€™s also available cheaper on AliExpress) for easy testing.

Links:
rootfs: https://felix.kaechele.ca/projects/thinksmart/pmos-lenovo-cd-18781y-testing-20240529-rootfs.img.xz
(note, this is just the img file, not a .tar.xz, so a simple unxz will do)

just the kernel package for people with existing installs: https://felix.kaechele.ca/projects/thinksmart/packages/20240529/linux-lenovo-cd-18781y-6.9.1_p20240529205011-r0.apk

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Current sale on the ThinkSmart if anyone is looking to stock up.

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Can you share instructions on how to install this on a ThinkSmart device?