Reverse engineering the Cybook hard-/software

[srml]

Opening the Cybook:
I did it yesterday! But I couldn't get the back of the case off completely, I worried I'd break something. I will try it again next week when I have more time and take some close-up pictures of the internals.

If someone wants to try it:
The screws are located under the rubber pads which can be removed quite easily and two more screws are inside the battery compartment. There is no screw unter the sticker. The back of the case can be lifted off with a small screwdriver without any damage, except for the lower right corner (near the d-pad) where the resistance was much higher.

Keep tweezers ready to reposition the buttons when reassembling the unit.

Analyzing the firmware update file:
I also tried to examine the firmware upgrade file. I didn't get that far. It is a single stripped ELF Arm 32 bit executable. I will publish my findings on http://dur.ch/konfiguriert/Cybook_Gen3

Does anybody have more information or an idea how to proceed?

(Disclaimer: Please first check if reverse engineering is legal in your country. In Switzerland it is.)

Daniel

[tompe]

There was somebody here that broke the screen of the Cybook. If there is a serious project to reverse engineer maybe a unit with totally broken screen could be useful...

[igorsk]

The best thing to examine disassembly is IDA Pro. objdump is not that fancy but might be a workable substitute.
BTW, I'm pretty sure you can distribute binaries containing GPL software even without consent of the maker.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by srml

Opening the Cybook:
I did it yesterday! But I couldn't get the back of the case off completely, I worried I'd break something. I will try it again next week when I have more time and take some close-up pictures of the internals.

If someone wants to try it:
The screws are located under the rubber pads which can be removed quite easily and two more screws are inside the battery compartment. There is no screw unter the sticker. The back of the case can be lifted off with a small screwdriver without any damage, except for the lower right corner (near the d-pad) where the resistance was much higher.

Keep tweezers ready to reposition the buttons when reassembling the unit.

Analyzing the firmware update file:
I also tried to examine the firmware upgrade file. I didn't get that far. It is a single stripped ELF Arm 32 bit executable. I will publish my findings on http://dur.ch/konfiguriert/Cybook_Gen3

Does anybody have more information or an idea how to proceed?

(Disclaimer: Please first check if reverse engineering is legal in your country. In Switzerland it is.)

Daniel

But what indentifying marks did you find inside the case that might give clue as to the hardware manufacturer?

Derek

[dottedmag]

FYI: Ondřej, our (OpenInkpot) GSoC student did the photos of internals and discovered serial port:

http://openinkpot.org/wiki/CybookGen3

[igorsk]

Here's the script which will extract individual update files from the update_kernel file:
http://projects.mobileread.com/reade...fw_extract.zip

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Here's the script which will extract individual update files from the update_kernel file:
http://projects.mobileread.com/reade...fw_extract.zip

Cool! Gotta break-out my EB-100 and see if it's the same hardware. Found the tape to hold the buttons in place when I remove the back panel.

Derek

[delphidb96]

Not here. I posted them elsewhere in MR. But here's the link.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...t=21808&page=8

Note that the chipset and even the firmware are the same between the Cybook Gen3 and the Netronix EB-100.

Derek

[delphidb96]

He's now got his stripped Cybook Gen3 running a bare-bones OI (Linux 2.6.x) kernel and has the display working. Here's an image of it showing it's true (and open-source) colors!

http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xherman1/cybook/tux.jpg

Derek