Stuff Wireless Charging Into A Nook’s Crannies

June 10, 2014 by 21 Comments

Qi receiver for NookMany technologies that come about for one type of product make us want to extend it to other things. For instance, we’d like the ability to remotely unlock our front door when it’s raining or our hands are full. Once [MS3FGX] experienced Qi wireless charging with his Nexus 5, he wanted the ability to wirelessly charge all the things. The first gadget on the list was his Nook Simple Touch eReader, which he successfully retrofit with a Qi receiver.

Space is at a premium inside of most modern technology. As it turns out, there is a burgeoning market for shoving inductive charging receivers into things. [MS3FGX] decided to try a Qi receiver meant for a Samsung S3, and it actually fits very well behind the battery. He glued it down and then cut a channel in the battery tray for the wires.

[MS3FGX] went full hack with this one and wired it to the Nook’s USB port on the inside. He would have preferred a thinner wire, but used some from a 40-pin IDE cable with little trouble. After the operation was complete, he put it on the Qi pad and it started charging right away. To his delight, the battery increased 20% after an hour. And yes, he can still charge the Nook the traditional way without any issues.

If you want to add wireless charging to any phone cheaply and easily, we’ve got you covered.

Nook Simple Touch As A Glider Computer

October 12, 2012 by 13 Comments

Look at the beautiful screen on that Nook Simple Touch. It has a lot of advantages over other hardware when used as a glider computer running the open source XCSoar software. The contrast of the display is excellent when compared to an LCD or AOMLED. That’s quite important as gliding through the wild blue yonder often includes intense sunlight. The display is also larger than many of the Android devices that have been used for this purpose. There are a few drawbacks though. One is that unlike other Android devices, this doesn’t have a GPS module built into it. But the price point makes up for the fact that you need to source an external module yourself.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the device used as a navigational display. This other hack put a simple touch on a sailboat for the same direct-sunlight-readability reason. For $100, and with the ability to root the system for use as an Android device, we expect to see this to keep popping up all over the place as a simple interface for a multitude of projects.

After the break you can see a video comparing the software running on a Nook display to one on a Dell Streak 5 LCD tablet.

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PlayStation Gaming On A NOOK Simple Touch

August 30, 2012 by 19 Comments

Improvements in processing power really hit home when you see an eBook reader playing PlayStation games. Sure, we’re talking about a system which launched more than 15 years ago (the original PlayStation launched way back in 1995), but this is a $99 device which seems to be playing the games at full speed!

[Sean] wrote in to share the project with us. After rooting the device he installed System 7 (aka Mac OS 7) using Mini vMac for Android. He uses Free PlayStation Emulator (FPSE) to run the games. There is an Android version which provides the touch-screen controls you see above. We figured the graphics would be awful, but the video after the break proves us wrong. Other than being in black and white we think the graphics are fantastic. Just one hack was necessary to make this happen. [Sean] uses NoRefresh to keep the Nook from refreshing the screen which is what causes the film-negative type of flashing after several page turns.

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Nook Touch Becomes A Desktop Computer

June 14, 2012 by 6 Comments

It looks like [Renate] has been pounding out hack after hack on her Nook touch. It stands on its own now thanks to a tripod bracket hack which is the most recent work she’s done. But there are bunch of other modifications, all of which are linked after the break.

We believe that this is meant for displaying lyrics as she sings and plays along. To that end there’s a foot pedal attachment that lets her control the device. It connects to the Nook via a USB hub that allows her to interface multiple devices at once. This in itself is also a hack, as host mode isn’t an out-of-the-box feature for the device. In order to avoid having to disconnect everything in order to top off the battery, she also manged to get the thing to charge from the USB hub. In fact, with all this in one package she’s basically got herself a desktop computer.

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Full Linux Distro On A Nook Color

April 17, 2012 by 20 Comments

We should have included a footnote in the title. You can say that [Thomas Polasek] installed a full version of Arch Linux on his Nook Color, but there’s one caveat. It’s running on top of the Android kernel and his proof-of-concept uses a second computer to get it up and running. But there’s potential for that to change moving forward.

Unlike previous attempts to run a Linux distro on Android, this does away with using a VNC to show the desktop. [Thomas] is commandeering Android’s frame buffer so that it can be used by the X desktop without needing to set up display drivers. To start off he installed a ROM based on CM7. A couple of Android apps give him the functionality needed to get the Arch Linux distro running from the SD card. This is accomplished by tunneling into the tablet via SSH, and using the ‘chroot’ command to make it active. The hope is that this can somehow be automated by a script.

A female to female USB coupler was used to connect the keyboard and mouse to the Nook. It looks like LXDE would be useless without them; touch control is not yet implemented. Those shortcomings aside, everything seems to be running pretty fast in the video after the break.

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Using The Nook As A Keyboard

March 16, 2012 by 5 Comments

[Andrew] has been pining for an Optimus Maximus – a keyboard with a small LCD screen in each key – for years. Like a lot of people, he love the idea of a completely configurable keyboard, but balked at the two thousand dollar price tag. Although it doesn’t have full color OLED screens behind each key, [Andrew]’s nook simple touch can be used as a keyboard just the same.

After rooting his new nook, [Andrew] had a very nice tablet computer, and the only Android device with an e-ink screen. Although[Andrew] never wrote an Android app before, he wanted to do a proof of concept build to see if a nook keyboard would actually work. The “keyboard app” is actually just a webpage hosted on his home server. When he presses a virtual key, JavaScript sends an ASCII value back to the server where it is decoded and sent to xte.

[Andrew] says his build works, but not very well. Opera mini doesn’t like the homebrew server he set up, and Cyrillic characters are a no go. Still, it works, and looks like an awesome application for an e-ink tablet with a proper Android app. Demo after the break.

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Dash-mounted Nook Color Is A Perfect Head Unit Replacement

December 5, 2011 by 30 Comments

jeep-nook-mount

XDA forum member [craigbru] wanted to beef up the audio setup in his Jeep, and thought that his Nook Color would make a suitable replacement. Since he jailbroke the e-reader, the head unit upgrade lets him do just about anything you can imagine, all from the comfort of the driver’s seat.

Seeing that he would continue to go off-road with the Jeep, he wanted to construct a mounting solution that was convenient and sturdy – something we think he did very well.

The dock was constructed using a Quadratec iVault stereo mount, along with a plastic tablet mount he had on hand. Because convenience was a primary goal, he put together a quick release charging solution as well as a simple audio interface using a set of touch contacts. This allows him to connect and detach the tablet from the Jeep without having to fuss with a bunch of cables each time. He also added an audio equalizer along with a Bluetooth OBDII interface to the setup, allowing him to tweak his tunes and monitor his engine with ease.

We think it’s a great-looking setup, and we’d be lying if we said we didn’t want one as well.

[Thanks, MS3FGX]