I don't know about these tablet devices but I once had to "hack" a little
android netbook because it had been bricked.
If the tabs are anything like this netbook then its generally not too hard.
This netbook was an ARM based system with about 128meg ram and 2gig onboard
Nand flash for storage.
In a nut shell I had to get a RS232 to lvTTL converter - FT232 chips do this or
there's old nokia USB sync cables you can butcher.
Had to find the serial port pin-out on the system board and solder the serial
converter wires onto it.
That gave me access to the netbooks serial console.
I was then able to get access to the boot loader on the device (uBoot).
From there I could manipulate boot settings, i could boot from SD card, boot
from TFTP, copy a new kernel into the onboard flash, change the boot splash,
etc.
Finding good working android images was the hard part because the manufacturer
didn't publish any android images so I had to rely on images people had dumped
from their devices.
And due to significant hardware differences they didn't really work well - no
sound, or no mouse, or no wifi, etc.
In the end I dumped Debian on it and used an android kernel to boot it.
------Original Message------
From: David Lyon
Sender: [email protected]
To: SLUG
Subject: [SLUG] Hacking "Hackable Android Pads"
Sent: Feb 17, 2012 2:02 PM
There's lots of inexpensive Android Tablets. Junk? perhaps:
- http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=android+tablet&catId=0
Question is, how to hack these things?
They have a linux bootloader, where's information on that generally ?
I know you have to build a kernel. That means picking devices on the board.
How's this all done ? Any good sources for Linux Kernels? Whats a good
Pad to use as a base?
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