New generation 3 Onn tablets are now available

[Renate]

I had my Onn8 Gen1 as navigation tablet.
I had always just glued a microphone adapter to the case of the Onn8.
I got tired of waiting for the glue to set and how brittle it was and that it fell off easily.
This time I pop-rivetted an Atlas Sound AD-11BE microphone flange to the back.
The flange normally takes an 8-32 screw but a 5/32" pop-rivet works perfectly.
5/32" is a bit rarer than 1/8" or 3/16".
Yes, the rivets are far too long but I didn't have a great selection.
First of all, there is nothing as flush as a rivet (unless you countersink a flathead and I don't like that on really thin materials anyway).
With the battery out there is plenty of room. I have the mount as high as it can go without being over the motherboard.
That means the center of the mount is 3" from the top.
I brought out the USB connector, speaker and WiFi antenna.
I don't like the USB out the bottom, it's too likely to get hit by my knee.

Sadly learned lesson: Be careful mating the case after opening that you mate the button side first or else you'll rip the cheesy membrane switches.
The power button still works but volume up is dead. No problem, I usually use the SWC controls anyway.

 

[Renate]

I can't speak to the difference between Onn8 Gen2 vs Gen3, but upgrading from Gen1 to Gen3 is a big jump.
I use this as a navigation tablet using Bluetooth steering wheel controls.
With the Gen1 you push a button to swap apps and it goes, "lemme see, ah, ok".
With the Gen3 it's literally like a video switcher the screen is instantly replaced with the other app.
Turning off animation is important, but I had it off before too.

Sort of unrelated: I use Firefox as a browser (some systems are on a local server).
The old "fennec" Firefox supported intents where you could go to a URL on a specific tab.
This was very helpful when switching back and forth to prevent having 100 tabs.
The last I checked, the next generation "fenix" Firefox did not support Intents with specific tabs.

      Intent intent = new Intent();
      intent.setPackage("org.mozilla.firefox");
      intent.setAction(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
      intent.setData(Uri.parse(link));
      intent.putExtra(Browser.EXTRA_APPLICATION_ID, "MyTab");
      intent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK|Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NO_ANIMATION);
      startActivity(intent);

Three years and counting: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/4106

Edit: Maybe I should make this another thread.
The intent to reuse the same tab works fine, but it was still showing animation when I switched to Firefox,
The thing is, (Fennec) Firefox has two main Activities:
The first, "LauncherActivity" has a few intent-filters so it is what gets activated by an intent.
The second, "BrowserApp" has no intent-filters and is only internally activated by the first.
So, in normal usage LauncherActivity looks at the intent and URL and if it's normal it dispatches it to BrowserApp and finishes.
Apparently it's the Activity finishing that causes this animation.
So I took all the intent-filters off the first Activity and transferred them to the second Activity.
Now it works without animation.
Undoubtedly the LauncherActivity does something but I don't need whatever feature it does.

 

[Renate]

An update on my problem with the volume up button which I killed.
The actual little metal dome that does the clicky part of the volume up button has gone to Nowhere Land.
There is the reset button (the 4th button) that I don't really need.
I picked off the little metal dome, stuck it to a piece of electrical tape, trimmed it down and stuck it where the volume up was.
It works great, same protrusion, same clicky feel.
If I need reset, there is a hole there which is centered over the center contact. I could ground that with a pin.

 

[Renate]

Not a lot of action here. Oh, well.

The Onn8 Gen2 has the speaker port out the back, the Gen3 has the speaker out the bottom edge.
The speaker and the GPS antenna are one and the speaker is fed off the little USB board.
That kind of makes things messy. Eventually I'll get a GPS ceramic patch antenna with a uFL connector.
I want to mount a 2" speaker (scavenged from a cheap portable Bluetooth speaker) on my dashboard so it points directly at me.
I didn't want to pick off the connection off the little USB board. There are test points on the mother board.
They are teensy-tiny, so I took my little speaker cord, spliced it to some 30 AWG solid wire to make the connection.
I'll put a human-sized two pin connector outside the case to connect to the dashboard speaker.

Edit: It's verified, the speaker gets a proper mono mix.

 

[Renate]

I bought this cheesy Bluetooth speaker to gut for the speaker inside. Mini speaker
I figured if the case itself is 3" then maybe the actual speaker is close to 2" (the size of the hole in my dashboard).
It's actually 1.5" diameter. It's loud enough if you were in a quiet place, but not loud enough with the engine going.
I'll have to find a bigger speaker.

Edit: I bought a Family Dollar "Glo" Bluetooth speaker for $5.
It's truly a "gutless wonder", but at least the speaker is 2" diameter.
The hole in my dashboard is that size so I just hot glued it in.

 

[Renate]

So my next project was integrating external GPS.

I have a MIKROE GNSS 7 Click with an active antenna on my server.
It's a great little GPS, has all 4 systems and always has over 20 satellites used for calculation.
I looked at the stock Linux gpsd daemon, but that seems to serve using JSON, which I guess is better than raw NMEA.

I like to keep the airwaves clear so I'm using multicast UDP of a 56 bytes frame of binary info.
I have a little Windows program to monitor it on my desktop.
I have yet to write the Service to run on the Walmart tablet.

So I wrote the Service and it runs fine. There is some strangeness with it not starting on BOOT_COMPLETED. I'll look into that.

It's kind of convenient though. If you've every used Google Maps (or any other location thing) you'll have noticed if you switch away from maps or switch off the device it takes a bit of time to get a fresh fix when you switch back/turn it back on. With external GPS coming in it has a fix immediately.
And I can get rid of the little GPS antenna on the tablet.

Oh, I rooted it with Magisk. It seemed the easiest way to set ro.allow.mock.location to 1
You also have to select your app in Developer Options for Mock Location.

FWIW: I've not had luck with fastboot boot whatever.img
It works fine with fastboot flash boot whatever.img, then fastboot reset

 

[Renate]

If you do a "battery-ectomy" you'll need to convince your device that it's not running out of charge.
I've found that the easiest way is to run this command. (The middle line is just one-time prep.)

$ su
# echo -n 1 > /data/local/tmp/one
# cp /data/local/tmp/one /sys/devices/platform/battery/FG_daemon_disable

This disables the interrupts on the "fuel gauge" (FG) which is part of the "power management IC" (PMIC).
You can put that last line in a Magisk module in service.sh
One small change is that the screen does not go on automatically when you plug/unplug the USB cable.

 

[tonismo]

Does

I've been having fun with this.

I used bkerler's MTKClient to pull the boot image. https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient
It's easier to do this in Linux, I used a spare Raspberry Pi.
Save your data plan (if you have one), don't use the GUI version and don't just "pip install -r requirements.txt".
Use requirements.txt as a guide and just pip install them when the program complains.

If you wanted you could let Magisk take over from there.

I've pulled the kallsyms out of the kernel and made a few mods to the code.
I put in an "empty" vbmeta too.

100071483:/ # getenforce
Permissive

Can you share the modified boot img and vbmeta img for the 100071483? I am having trouble trying to pull boot img

 

[Renate]

Oh. I had to get around to snarfing a copy off my device...
This is magisk'ed for 100071483
You don't need vbmeta. If you want you can throw in an empty vbmeta.

 

[tonismo]

Oh. I had to get around to snarfing a copy off my device...
This is magisk'ed for 100071483
You don't need vbmeta. If you want you can throw in an empty vbmeta.

Thank you so much!I flashed it and now the tablet turns off after showing the boot logo. Is there any ways to fix this?

 

[tonismo]

Well I was able to reboot into fastboot flash it again but no luck. Do you happen to have TWRP for this tablet too?

 

[Renate]

Sorry, I hadn't remembered that this did use vbmeta.
I hope that you can get to fastboot?

C:\>fastboot erase vbmeta
C:\>fastboot flash vbmeta vbmeta_empty.img

 

[tonismo]

Sorry, I hadn't remembered that this did use vbmeta.
I hope that you can get to fastboot?

C:\>fastboot erase vbmeta
C:\>fastboot flash vbmeta vbmeta_empty.img

Everything works!Thank You old great one!

 

[tonismo]

Everything boots up fine but now the Wifi wont turn on lol

 

[Renate]

Everything boots up fine but now the Wifi wont turn on lol

Hmm, could be a version mismatch between kernel and system?

$ getprop|grep finger
onn/100071483/100071483:11/RP1A.200720.011/1645855200:user/release-keys

I've had a problem with mine. There's an 84.31MB "security update". I can download it but it gets a "verification error" and doesn't proceed. Then it complains that it still has an update.
The verification error happens when I press "Restart now" after the download. I must have downloaded that 84.31 MB a dozen times (in the past and today).
I reinstalled the stock boot and tried to update but it does the same thing. I reinstalled the stock vbmeta and tried to update but it does the same thing.

 

[tonismo]

Hmm, could be a version mismatch between kernel and system?

$ getprop|grep finger
onn/100071483/100071483:11/RP1A.200720.011/1645855200:user/release-keys

I've had a problem with mine. There's an 84.31MB "security update". I can download it but it gets a "verification error" and doesn't proceed. Then it complains that it still has an update.
The verification error happens when I press "Restart now" after the download. I must have downloaded that 84.31 MB a dozen times (in the past and today).
I reinstalled the stock boot and tried to update but it does the same thing. I reinstalled the stock vbmeta and tried to update but it does the same thing.

mine shows 11/RP1A.200720.011/1656423915:user
Do you think you can capture the OTA update and manually update it through recovery?

 

[tonismo]

I did a log check when turning the wifi on. It shows "Failed to load wifi driver".

 

[Renate]

Ok. I guess I'll have to back up some things, do a factory reset, do an update, get the new boot and magisk it.

 

[tonismo]

Can you share the stock boot img when you get it?

 

[Renate]

I restored to stock, hit factory refresh in recovery, it started clean.
I entered WiFi details, then it wanted to install the same damn 84.31 MB.
It loaded it and failed, then rebooted, loaded it and failed...

Ok, it checks the boot image before updating. I finally got:

onn/100071483/100071483:11/RP1A.200720.011/1656423915:user/release-keys

Now I'm going to catch the stock boot. You can magisk that yourself. You'll need the original if updates come through.