Tag Archives: cheap hardware

Hardware, Linux

Kobo Mini Haxxing

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Last weekend a buddy of mine picked up a Kobo Mini on sale for $40 while we were out and about. Smoking deal for the baby brother of the ereader I use (Kobo Glo). After sharing the sale info with friends it was pointed out to me that the kobo is readily hackable. At $40 it was really hard to turn down the opportunity. So I bought two of them.

Foolishly I went through the setup/registration/autoupdate on them before doing much reading into it. After finding out that the first app (Kobo Weather App) I wanted to try out required a python library that didn’t like the latest firmwares (2.6.x) project number one became revert back to an older firmware.

After some trial and error the process worked out as such:

  1. Reset the device to factory defaults. Settings -> Device Information -> Factory Reset
  2. The device will reboot after it restores to the factory image. Select Computer Setup.
  3. Plug the Kobo in and copy the desired firmware (from here) to the .Kobo folder on the SD card
  4. Umount the kobo and unplug it, it will reboot again.
  5. Select Computer Setup a second time, plug in via USB.
  6. Using sqlite open .kobo/KoboReader.sqlite I found instructions for this here, however when I attempted the sql insert it failed saying that the user table now has 7 columns and I was only giving it 5 columns of data.  I ran:
    PRAGMA table_info(user);
    to display the current table schema. It seems like at some point they added a column for Facebook Login and whether or not you’ve purchased anything from the store. I added the extra two columns of data to the insert statement:
    INSERT INTO "user" VALUES('aaaaaaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaa','aaaaaaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaa','xxxx@xxxx.xx','xxxx@xxxx.xx','2aaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaa==','','0');
  7. Exited sqlite, ejected the mounted volume, unplugged the Kobo Mini, and it jumped from the setup screen to the main screen of the Kobo software. My mini was now running 2.5.2

After that I copied over the update package to enable telnet, shut down the device, disassembled it, took out the sd card and used ddrescue to create an image of the card. Now I can install apps and muck around and have a good point to revert back to should I break the install too horribly in my playing.