[Alpha] Kobo-UNCaGED - Calibre wireless connection

[sherman]

Hi Folks,

I've been working on this on and off for a while now, and I thought it's probably about time to let the public have a go to try and break it (won't be hard ).

Introducing Kobo-UNCaGED, an implementation of the Calibre wireless protocol for Kobo devices. You can now stop looking longingly at those pesky Android readers and their Calibre Companion app, as this program lets us Kobo eink users join the wireless fun too!

This is an initial public alpha release of the software. There will be bugs. Probably lots of bugs. It shouldn't brick your Kobo though. If you are worried about data loss, I would recommend backing up your user partition first.

NiLuJe helped me with some early testing, and hopefully between us we've found most of the show-stopper issues. Along the way, NiLuJe fixed my shell scripts for me too. Thanks NiLuJe!

I'll let my readme explain more details: https://github.com/shermp/Kobo-UNCaGED

Release archive can be found at github

Please test and provide feedback. I also welcome pull-requests, if anyone wants to help improve it. I'm under no illusions that my code is perfect, or even particularly clean, so any assistance is very much appreciated.

Have fun!

[NiLuJe]

In particular, as this relies on some finicky FBInk bits, I expect some wonkiness on my usual suspect, the H20²r1 .

So, if the USB pop-up never gets "clicked", I'll have to dust-off my old thread about that .

In the same vein, this definitely won't work with NightMode enabled, and patched rotations *may* also be an issue .

[sherman]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

In particular, as this relies on some finicky FBInk bits, I expect some wonkiness on my usual suspect, the H20²r1 .

So, if the USB pop-up never gets "clicked", I'll have to dust-off my old thread about that .

In the same vein, this definitely won't work with NightMode enabled, and patched rotations *may* also be an issue .

Hmmm, IIRC Kobo added a "connect automatically" feature in the last few versions of the FW, activated by changing an option in the
Kobo ereader.conf"

Maybe Kobo-UNCaGED could detect that option as a fallback/alternative.

[ICDeadPpl]

How about having the books transferred to the sd card?
I tried to transfer one book, and it ended up in the root of the internal storage.

[sherman]

Originally Posted by ICDeadPpl

How about having the books transferred to the sd card?
I tried to transfer one book, and it ended up in the root of the internal storage.

That's on the TODO list. I think I have it mostly plumbed in already, but I can't be sure until I a) do testing, and b) Figure out the best way to let the user choose which to use.

Note, from what I can tell from the calibre wireless protocol, it doesn't appear to allow using multiple storage devices simultaneously.

[NiLuJe]

@sherman: That'd help with the touch shenanigans, but not with the processing pass detection . (In other words, that'd help on the Touch/H2O²r1, but do nothing for nightmode).

[sherman]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@sherman: That'd help with the touch shenanigans, but not with the processing pass detection . (In other words, that'd help on the Touch/H2O²r1, but do nothing for nightmode).

Having never used nightmode before, is it a) detectable, and b) does it just invert everything?

Maybe button_scan can detect night-mode and behave accordingly?

[NiLuJe]

There's unfortunately a bunch of different implementations, so it's annoying to check for everything ;/.

One semi foolproof way would be to trigger an update and sniff the ioctl to check the flags, but that's somewhat non-trivial to do, as I don't really feel like reimplementing a subset of strace ;/.

[sherman]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

There's unfortunately a bunch of different implementations, so it's annoying to check for everything ;/.

One semi foolproof way would be to trigger an update and sniff the ioctl to check the flags, but that's somewhat non-trivial to do, as I don't really feel like reimplementing a subset of strace ;/.

Aww crap Never mind.

I guess another option is to have an option that the user can manually select if they have a nightmode hack enabled I suppose.

[NiLuJe]

I can probably fairly easily detect Nickel's own implementation, at least, which would be better than nothing .

[NiLuJe]

Err, I just had a light-bulb moment after a good nap: hardware inversion doesn't actually affect framebuffer content. So, in effect, nightmode isn't an issue at all. Yay \o/.

(Unless you want to account for legacy nightmode hack implementations that did it in software, which was terrible).

[sherman]

Announcing the v0.3.0 public release! A couple of new features, and lots of code improvements in this one.

Release archives are available from https://github.com/shermp/Kobo-UNCaG...ses/tag/v0.3.0

I'll regurgitate my release notes from Github below:

Introducing the second public release of Kobo-UNCaGED. Lots of internal code refactoring and bug fixes in this one, but a couple of new features as well

• External SD card support. If you have an SD card inserted into your Kobo, you can tell Kobo-UNCaGED to prefer saving books to/from it. Note, you may only use one of internal storage or SD card at any given time, as the wireless driver does not allow for multiple simultaneous storage locations. Set preferSDCard = true in ku.toml to enable this.
• Improved image thumbnail generation. Massive thanks to @NiLuJe and @geek1011 for helping to implement image thumbnail improvements. The changes make the process both faster, and more correct. There are some options in ku.toml to customize this to some extent
• Shell script fixes and improvements
• Lots of internal code refactoring by myself and @geek1011

Note, if using an external SD card, it is highly recommended to upgrade kfmon to 1.3.0 to avoid issues.

An upgrade archive is now provided, which only upgrades the shell scripts, default config file, and binary. You may also upgrade using the full release if desired.

Again, huge thanks to @geek1011 and @NiLuJe for their help.

[sherman]

What's this? A new release?

At long last, I've done some more work on this. Mostly internal refactoring.

The one new feature is KU now has the option of updating metadata via a database trigger now, similar to how Kepubify does it. The pro's are no need to connect to the database the second time to update metadata. The main con is that it extends the Kobo database schema, although in practice, this should have no effect on the operation of the device.

As always, the new release can be found on the GitHub releases page.

[church mouse]

I'm not sure if anyone can help me on this, but trying this on my Clara HD I seem to have an issue in running this;

I am getting as far as "USBMS mode entered . . ." messaging on my Clara, followed by a flash screen for Kobo-Uncaged v0.4

Then immediately it enters the dismount process of "Leaving USBMS . . .","Disabling WiFi" etc without ever connecting to Calibre on my network.

Finally, after a few seconds I will get a message "Something strange happened ku:2;BS:61"

Any ideas where I am going wrong?

[Carmelocotonto]

Originally Posted by church mouse

I'm not sure if anyone can help me on this, but trying this on my Clara HD I seem to have an issue in running this;

I am getting as far as "USBMS mode entered . . ." messaging on my Clara, followed by a flash screen for Kobo-Uncaged v0.4

Then immediately it enters the dismount process of "Leaving USBMS . . .","Disabling WiFi" etc without ever connecting to Calibre on my network.

Finally, after a few seconds I will get a message "Something strange happened ku:2;BS:61"

Any ideas where I am going wrong?

Same to me. This happened because I did not have calibre activated at office. At home I'll try again.