Another weird cursed e-ink gadget from Lenovo. Seems to have already been discontinued? withdrawn? from sale and is being sold off cheapish in various places. It seems like it was manufactured by BOE Technology for Lenovo.
I dumped various things from the eMMC on my unit.
Is it a PineNote?
A bit?
Same:
- Rockchip RK3566 SoC
- MMC bus WiFi BCM43455
- Most likely the same eink panel
- Possibly the same or very similar Wacom digitiser at
/sys/devices/platform/fe5c0000.i2c/i2c-3/3-0009. Using a "wacom_pencil" driver in Android, I will try the Linux hid-over-i2c driver. - Warm / cool backlight
- Externally accessible "boot to loader / maskrom mode" switch
- U-Boot 2017.09 with the familiar "can't read past 32MiB with
rkdeveloptool" problem - Linux 4.19 kernel in supplied Android
Different:
- Touch controller, seems to be a Goodix GT8X at
/sys/devices/platform/fe5a0000.i2c/i2c-1/1-005d. The kernel has baked in drivers for several touch screens but this is the one that is actually bound. - Ambient light sensors
- 64GiB eMMC instead of 128GiB
- No obvious external UART :(
- Fewer microphones
Should I buy one?
Probably not unless you plan on hacking it. The included software is quite bad and Lenovo seems to have already abandoned it even before they ran out of stock to sell :(
Android rooting
I used rkdeveloptool to dump the uboot_a partition then applied the same patch documented by Dorian for the PineNote to remove the 32MiB partition download limit. You can download my patched uboot_a image which is likely to work on any other Smart Paper.
Once the 32MiB limit is removed you can dump the boot_a partition, sideload Magisk and copy the boot_a dump to the device using MTP (gMTP or Dolphin both work). Use Magisk to root the boot_a image, copy it back off the device and re-flash it. Booting the modified image and re-running Magisk allows finishing the rooting process.
Alternatively it's probably possible to just flash my patched boot_a image though I'm less confident this will work on any given device, especially if it's had Android upgraded at any point.