Roo – Page 45 – Roo's View

Restore Rogers Galaxy Tab 7 to stock

When I got my Galaxy Tab 7″ one of the first things I did was to see if I could collect the stock firmware in a format that was useful in case I ever wanted to restore the tablet back to it’s stock form. It turned out that the 2.2 based firmware was not easily available on the net, and neither was the 2.3 version.

The results of my work are captured in an XDA thread, but restoring from those captures was an exercise left to the reader. The 2.2 (froyo) image is captured directly from the device, I first rooted the tablet with SuperOneClick then used rotobackup to capture a heimdall friendly set of files for flashing. The original work was tracked in another XDA thread where you can read the blow by blow if you’re interested. For 2.3 (gingerbread) I was able to grab the intermediate files from Kies during the normal upgrade process – the rest of this post will talk about how to use those files to restore the P1000R to a stock 2.3 state.

I’m using heimdall version 1.3.1 on Linux, but other versions and platforms should work fine. I particularly like using Linux to flash the GalaxyTab as it doesn’t suffer the same driver madness that Windows seems to have, USB devices just work. I’ll assume you can find the download and extract the files.

You’ll want to specify the PIT file – gt-p1000_mr.pit, it’s safe to select the repartition box as we’ll be doing the full monty here [sharp eyed readers will notice that the picture at the top of this post doesn’t have the box checked, that’s a mistake on my part – go ahead and check it]. The files map to the heimdall partition names as follows:

MODEM -> modem.bin CACHE -> cache.rfs KERNEL -> zImage FACTORYFS -> factoryfs.rfs PARAM -> param.lfs IBL+PBL -> boot.bin SBL -> sbl.bin

So click on the Add button and specify the partition type and files from the downloaded and extracted ROM.

Next you need to get your device into download mode. My preferred approach is to hold the power+volume down buttons until the download screen appears (yellow triangle with android digging). Now you can click start on heimdall.

Under Linux at least , this will hit 100% and then fail to reboot. That’s ok. Wait a minute or two to make sure it’s really done, then force it to reboot into recovery mode by holding power+volume up until you see the recovery screen.

Assuming the flash has gone well, the stock recovery will start up and automatically try to install some updates. You should see:

-- Updating filesystem... E:failed to mount /dbdata (Invalid argument) E:discard_filesystem_for_rfs:Can't mount /dbdata

-- Wiping cache... Formatting /cache Cache wipe failed.

Don’t panic. Remember that this update was expecting to have come from a properly installed 2.2 stock, we’re leaping into the middle of the process.

Using the recovery menus, select ‘factory reset + wipe data’ followed by ‘wipe cache’. One hint for those not used to the stock recovery image, the capacitive home button is used to select entries and volume up/down for navigation.

Now you can reboot. The first boot will take a while as it sorts things out and rebuilds the cache(s). All should go well and you’ll be greeted by the stock home screen.

Creating DVD Videos with Ubuntu

There are many different ways to take some video on Ubuntu and convert it to a physical DVD that will play back on most DVD players and while the command line would be fine, it’s certainly nice to see there is at least one option that provides a reasonable GUI and supports the creation of menus.

I tried DeVeDe before coming across Bombono. I was trying to take a number of 15 and 30 minute recorded children’s shows stored as mp4’s and convert them into a playable DVD. For some reason DeVeDe aborted with little to no diagnostic information after a couple of videos, it was easier to move on than mess with it.

Bombono was able to convert all of my videos, but the version available in the Ubuntu repository was older and had some serious issues related to menu editing. It turns out there is a PPA that is current (1.2.1), instructions for installing via the PPA are hosted on the bombono wiki. I expect in future the Ubuntu repository version will catch up and be the easiest way to get this utility, but in the near future I recommend getting it from the PPA.

The PPA install places things in the /opt/bombono-dvd-testing hierarchy, which is fine but it doesn’t provide an easy way to run it. I added a link in /usr/local/bin so that I can launch it from the command line

$sudo ln -s /opt/bombono-dvd-testing/bin/bombono-dvd /usr/local/bin/bombono-dvd

It does appear that there is a .desktop file in /opt/bombono-dvd-testing/share/applications so a little creativity and I’m sure you could easily integrate it into the Ubuntu menu system.

The 1.2.1 version (via the PPA) has quite nice menu editing. I wouldn’t claim this is the same level you’d expect on a Mac, but it very easy to use. One of the more polished utilities I’ve seen on Linux. Menus support background images and buttons that can be stills or motion video clips. I did experience problems trying to use too many motion clips on a single menu (it rendered most of them as stills), it may be possible to work around this by generating the DVD folder then manually adding the appropriate video clips. The alignment and snap to grid tools are handy for making the menu line up.

You of course can choose to create a DVD without a menu. Simply omit any menu and the DVD will play the video when the disk is inserted.

Before you get going with Bombono, make sure you use the Project menu and select Preferences, you’ll want to choose NTSC or PAL as appropriate and choose how many cores for it to use.

The size estimation is terrible, a 4.4GB estimate (with warning it wouldn’t fit) resulted in 3.3GB iso. This is a bit frustrating if you’re trying to maximize the quality of a full length movie on a single layer DVD (then again, if you’re burning a 2hr movie to a single layer DVD you’ve already made a number of compromises). There is an option to create dual layer DVDs, but I didn’t try this out. It appears to create 16:9 animorphic DVDs just fine, but either mixed 4:3 content (or possibly 4:3 content in general) ends up stretched.

I’ll include a reference to the forum, but it does seem fairly quiet there.

Review: Filtrete 3M-50 Wifi Thermostat

I came across this particular wifi enabled thermostat a year or so ago, unfortunately they are not available in Canada. I’d guess this is simply the additional headache of bringing an electronic device to market in Canada (yes, different hoops than what is needed in the USA) and the market size. On my last trip to the states I took the opportunity to drop into a HomeDepot and pick one up. There was only 1 unit in the entire city I was in (I had to go to both HomeDepot stores!) – so you may have trouble getting one even if you live in the US, I suggest you call ahead.

The sales pitch on having your home thermostat wifi enabled is to make it simpler to program, and easier to adjust from anywhere in the house or out of the house. When we leave on vacation, turning down the heat and reprogramming the 7 day schedule is pretty low on the priority list. Being able to do so from the hotel over the internet would be handy. I’m looking forward to the ability to pull out more statistics from the device and surface them in graphs, for example yesterday my furnace was on for 4hrs 47mins and today it ran 2hrs 46mins (it was much warmer today).

Most of this post will discuss the installation process, as this is primarily my experience with it so far. Some of this will be specific to my particular install but I’ll try to walk you through the process I used to arrive at a successful result. If you want to stop reading here the short version is that it’s pretty cool, you probably want one.

The first step is to read (or at least flip quickly) through the manuals included. The packaging strongly indicates you need a C wire, the manual lists it as optional. The C wire is required, don’t get confused by the manual. Next take a look the wiring for your existing thermostat.

The good news is that the wire coming out of the wall has more than enough conductors to carry a C wire if I need to add one. The bad news is that I’m standing there scratching my head because I don’t really understand the current wiring. My existing thermostat is a Honeywell MagicStat CT 3300 for which I was able to easily find a manual online. This helped me identify the wiring that was connected.

Next stop is to go take a look at the furnace, to map the other end of the wires. Unfortunately between the furnace and the thermostat I found this, something I’ll call the mess-o-wires.

The mess-o-wires ties in my A/C unit to the furnace and the thermostat. Opening up the furnace I get to the control board where the wiring starts.

So basically I have my furnace, connected to a wire A, this in turn heads to the mess-o-wires, then connects to wire B, this runs upstairs to the thermostat. Mapping the wire colors and connections results in the following table. The last column is the CT3300 hook ups. I also found a helpful reference to understand what the wiring names were.

Color	Wire A	Wire B	CT 3300
Y	orange	yellow	Y
R	red	red + black	Rh + Rc
W1	white	white	W
G	green	green	G
C	black

This lead to an ah-hah moment. So I’m basically running in a 4 wire mode at the thermostat W Y RH G. The RH and RC are bridged back in that mess-o-wires. Knowing this helped me map to the 3M-50 manual for how to properly hook things up. The solution is that I need to fix the mess-o-wires to allow the C wire to run up to the thermostat using the black wire. Let me stress that this is unlikely to be your solution, but the process of wire tracing and mapping should help you understand your current setup and how to perform the install. If this is over your head, call your furnace service folks to do this part.

Once I was past this part, the actual installation went very smoothly – just follow the manual. The wifi unit ships along with the unit, but is not installed and the manuals don’t seem to reference it beyond providing a URL: www.radiothermostat.com/wifi. I inserted the wifi module while the thermostat was on and running, it seemed to handle that just fine. When you do visit www.radiothermostat.com/wifi you’ll find a friendly 3 step process:

Register for an account on the web
Verify Thermostat Installation
Use laptop to connect your thermostat to your local wifi, and then to the internet

It’s not really three steps since step three contains more sub steps. My notes are a bit sketchy here, but it didn’t seem to provide much in the way of hand holding – they assume you know what you’re doing when it comes to wireless setup. At this point I’ll deviate from how I did the setup and talk about the iOS app. If you have an iDevice, then you should do step 3 above entirely using it. I’m not sure how smoothly a second iOS device will work out as it seemed that I was forced to re-setup the wifi connection (step 3) on the iPad even though it seemed to be working fine over a web browser. (again my notes are a bit rough as to what happened) I’m certain you can have multiple iOS devices, you just might have to go through the setup phase more than once.

There is also an Android app. This seems to be poorly advertised as I only found it while writing this post, they should really add it to the website. Adding the app to my phone and logging in, I’m able to view my thermostat without any network re-setup required. So my iOS app experience above of needing to re-setup the wifi must have been due to some other issue I was having.

I will say that I really like the wireless configuration approach. Much better than the Logitech HarmonyLink mess with a USB cable and browser plugins. The HarmonyLink could easily adopt this style of setup – creating an ad-hoc network to do the wireless configuration. The thermostat generates a 5 digit verification code to ensure that it’s really you, the HarmonyLink could simply flash the led to give you a verification pattern.

For some reason Chrome didn’t seem to work to create an account. Switching to Firefox solved this. After I had created the account, Chrome worked just fine. In fact, the website has a reasonable mobile layout as well. So a strike against them for doing something odd with account sign ups, but kudos for getting it mostly right no matter what device you visit the website with.

The iOS app is very simple, it lets you control the basic functions: temperature up/down; home/away; fan on/off/auto; heat/cool. You cannot set a schedule with the app it seems. The schedule can be set on the device (but who would do that?) and via a full web browser. The mobile version of the website is limited in a similar manner as the iOS app. The Android app appears to offer the same functions as the iOS app.

Configuration of Celcius vs. Fahrenheit is supported by the web/iOS/Android app in a single setting. The physical display on the thermostat requires you configure this as is shown on this youtube video. This had me puzzled for a bit until I found the video link, it is also mentioned in the FAQ.

There is a developer API available and folks who’ve created impressive private versions of a web UI. Interesting that temperatures are all Fahrenheit in the developer API, so I assume that’s how it is stored internally. I’ll certainly be experimenting in this direction when I have some time. The forums seems to be fairly active and have some good content in them from the quick browsing I’ve done.