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Anyone using a nook classic? Looking to flash it ram chip. — Parallax Forums

Anyone using a nook classic? Looking to flash it ram chip.

rwgast_logicdesignrwgast_logicdesign Posts: 1,464
edited 2012-07-13 15:25 in General Discussion
So I have this Nook classic I got for free and I would be happy with it if the PDF viewer didnt sucks. I was so excited to get this all my EBooks and Data sheets are PDF though and unless the thing is set on an unreadable font size it wont show pictures embedded in the pdf. Its just horrible, if the PDF viewer would flip to landscape and zoon that would solve all my gripes!!

I was gonna sell it and buy a 29 dollar color wal mart ereader, but wal mart isnt stocking those at the moment... So I looked into rooting this thing and that seems like it will solve all my PDF woes plus the thing has uart headers and jtag! This could be a fun device to get a chroot debian working on, if only I could root it. The only site I can find on this thing is nookdevs and unfourtantely my reader is so new it has the nightmare firmware on it from the factory which make rooting a PITA. The old way I guess of doing this would have been to take the thing apart and edit the android image which was stored on an SD card. My nook uses a 2gb BGA flash chip now. Im assuming what im about to ask would be fairly easy if I had a bus pirate but im poor. There are 5 resistors around the flash im assuming there the pull ups for the dat line. I reviewed the Data Sheet. What im hoping is there may be some way I can use a propeller or some kind of home brew interface to to read and write the flash chip. Can anyone tell me how big of a deal this would be, im hoping maybe its as easy as putting an image file on an sd card and using a few prop pins with some kind of generic obex flash object to write and read the images on the flash. There are 2 other ways I can root the thing but there a huge pita too due to my current network access situation.

Im also hoping someone on here has played with the uart and jtag stuff on these boards im really hoping i can use the TX/RX lines through a terminal to talk to the prop or BT or anything serial really. Like I said nookdevs is the only resource for the classic I can find and theres not alot of hardware hacks on that site so any info would be awesome if your a nook hacker.

Comments

  • icepuckicepuck Posts: 466
    edited 2012-07-11 07:01
    Have a look at...
    http://www.xda-developers.com/

    they have lots of info on how to root just about any android device.
    I rooted my HTC evoshift/detail and used the linux installer from google play to install debian.
    It runs in chroot but you can do just about any of the typical linux stuff with it.
    -dan
  • rwgast_logicdesignrwgast_logicdesign Posts: 1,464
    edited 2012-07-11 08:05
    yes xda is a nice place. ive made a few winmo roms and android kernels and xda has always been a solid source of info for me. i had acually planned on running a chroot :). looks like were on the same page, problem is xda has all the nook devices except the nook classic :/, nook classic is running android 1.5 im not sure why the only info i can find is nookdevs and a russian jtag article .... these things appear super simple and hackable.
  • CircuitsoftCircuitsoft Posts: 1,166
    edited 2012-07-13 15:24
    I rooted my Nook, but it involved use of a wireless access point with intentional rogue DNS entries.

    If you'd like, you can ship me your nook and I can root it and ship it back to you. All I ask is repayment of shipping charges.
  • CircuitsoftCircuitsoft Posts: 1,166
    edited 2012-07-13 15:25
    Also, on that note, I have extracted the entire flash from mine, so when I get time, I'll be writing a new firmware for it. I figure I can store rendered pages on the SD card, then have the bootloader do a page turn before booting a minimal render-next-page-only OS.
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