Lenovo ThinkSmart View ROM/OS Development

Ah now we’re talking, after starting with the 191011.0035 debug ROM I was able to get the Android 11 GSI booted as well. Same deal with no wifi, I tried copying the firmware he added from /vendor/firmware to /system/etc/firmware but still looking into how that’s supposed to work with treble.

One thing other people have noted is that once the display turns off it doesn’t come back on until restarting, so be sure to bump up the screen timeout.

Also what’s up with the donald duck boot screen :laughing:

If the screen times out you can plug in the usb-c cable and usb debugging mode should auto wake it. I am still having trouble getting the wifi firmware working too

Got to applaud @FelixKa’s progress with booting the kernel. Considerable knowledge and experience on display in his work.

Also, much gratitude to @deadman96385 for… everything really!

We probably wouldn’t be having this discussion if it weren’t for his original XDA thread!

His latest revelation about GSI is icing on the :cake:

Despite the issues, the gsi rom does feel pretty fast.

I haven’t run any benchmarks, but on average, I’d say 10-25% faster than Kingston-ha-rom. Going full 64bit would make the little thinksmart a real performer, IMHO.

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I’m back with a cautionary tale. :sweat_smile: I was curious if I could rearrange the partitions to make more room for an arm64 GSI. /system is p24 and it goes through 51 so it was kind of a mess but I got it worked out with sector alignment etc. Figured I could boot with EDL and flash to the new locations, but nope, nothing but 900e mode after that and thought I might’ve bricked it.

Googled around and learned about the “deep flash cables” that you can DIY by shorting some wires, or pick one up cheap from amazon. Figured I’d already done enough damage so I got a pre-made and yep does the trick! Got it back to EDL and flashed and booted the debug rom again.

Looking forward to something usable here, seems like we’re getting close.

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I’ve learned that display drivers are located in two parts of a device, the bootloader (LK or LittleKernel) and the actual Linux kernel. LK sets up the display for the bootsplash and all and the Linux kernel simply takes that initialized display as is. However, when the display goes to sleep it is essentially reset and now it’s the Linux kernel’s turn to initialize it. If for some reason that re-initialization fails you’ll end up with exactly the behaviour you described. So I am not sure whether the OS needs to do something special after resuming in order to wake the display properly.

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FWIW, running with GSI 11 Fully Kiosk is able to turn to turn the screen back on now and correctly reports the screenOn status. Since it’s the same kernel yeah it does appear to be something in the OS.

Also this could be nothing but made me wonder if there’s a different control for the “screen” vs the “backlight” [GUIDE][ROOT] Unlocking and Improving Your Lenovo ThinkSmart View (CD-18781Y) | Page 3 | XDA Forums

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Sorry to jump in, I just have 3 devices ordered and waiting for the delivery. Have you tried these to make the WIFI work?

https://xdaforums.com/t/guide-root-unlocking-and-improving-your-lenovo-thinksmart-view-cd-18781y.4584033/post-89303829

https://xdaforums.com/t/guide-root-unlocking-and-improving-your-lenovo-thinksmart-view-cd-18781y.4584033/post-89318804

can confirm wifi working with these steps. just make sure if you are provisioning more than one to change the mac address on every device.

Yes those were the steps I took, but after it didn’t work I just waited until Deadman updated his firmware for flashing with QFIL with the wifi fixes. So last night I booted into EDL mode, installed the new firmware, rebooted recovery, factory reset, and then after reboot i had to “set up offline” and then put my wifi credentials in after setup. Three devices flashed in just a few minutes, the wallpanel app works well, and I also use tasker with the hotword plugin for wakeword voice assist. 2 of the tablets lost connection a couple times last night, I’m not sure what happened there.

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I’ve noticed some flaky wifi as well, but with the ROM that was originally posted here. I had to power off/on to get wifi to come back. Not sure if that input helps at all.

The wifi seemed to come back on its own, I use one for streaming the webcam feed into frigate from the wallpanel app, and noticed in the logs when I woke up that it dropped out and then reconnected after some time.

Do you have the IP addresses in the router as Dynamic or did you assign static IPs to these devices? The router/WIFI DHCP expiry might cause such issues where a device is assigned an IP for few hours/a day then the device stops communicating with the router and the router de-assigns the IP. Till the device sends another packet, the router doesn’t renew the IP or extend the IP lease.

Thanks a lot… What are the “set up offline” steps you followed?

Just on the first boot, when it asks to connect to a wifi network I skipped that part. Go through the setup without connecting to wifi network until the home launcher appears

That’s not actually how TCP/IP works. The device starts requesting to refresh the IP address at half the TTL and will continue to do so until the router grants it.

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That is true given Android system doesn’t turn off WIFI on sleep mode. Otherwise, the DHCPREQUEST will be sent once the system wakes up.

Just as I thought I’d be losing my sanity over this one :stuck_out_tongue:

This is a pretty barebones Kernel 6.7.2 trying to boot postmarketOS on the ThinkSmart View here (probably in a world-wide first :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:), no device configurations made, really. So nothing works as of now. But I couldn’t - for the life of me - get the thing to show me any more than a blinking cursor before.

I hope it gets easier from here. I’m almost sure it won’t but at least I’m not flying blind anymore :nerd_face:

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Started updating the first post with the current status of PostmarketOS on the device. So far: It runs stable and I can SSH into it through USB Networking. Storage works. Not a whole lot else is working yet.

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:exploding_head::partying_face::nerd_face:

You sir, are a hero and a gentleman :clap:

EPIC progress :sunglasses:

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Incredible work! Glued to the progress updates over here.

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