Monday, September 15, 2014

Installing mesh extenders with Michael

An old friend of the Serval Project, Michael Adeyeye, is here with us in the batcave for the week to see what we are doing, and for us to share knowledge with him.

Apart from it being great to catch up with an old friend, the timing is perfect, as we have just finished our simplified installation process for the Mesh Extenders.  So Michael gets to test the documentation and procedure for installing Mesh Extenders, so that we can fix any problems.  All going well, we will finally have the initial batch of Mesh Extenders from the crowd-funding campaign ready to ship.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Unbricking a Kindle paperwhite

I have a student who is working on real-time tracking of our University's loop-bus, together with displays at each bus stop to tell how many minutes until the loop-bus next arrives.

We are using Kindle paperwhite e-readers as the e-ink display will be easy to read during the day, and it includes a backlight to allow for night-time visibility.

The Kindles are fairly easy to root and modify, however, as with all these sorts of things, it is possible to mess things up so that it won't boot, i.e., bricking it.

We did indeed manage to brick our Kindle, and set off on a protracted adventure to work out how to unbrick it.  We were greatly frustrated by the lack of a clear and authoritative set of instructions on how to do this, and thus decided to fix this by documenting the process.

Tobias has summarised the method in the following gist:

https://gist.github.com/TobiasWooldridge/22f0cdca75190b9a473f

If you find this information useful, please consider donating to http://servalproject.org.