[Nook Color Android Development] steven676:
About Nook Color hardware revisions ...

In our efforts to debug problems people are seeing with our ROMs, we've encountered several different hardware revisions of the Nook Color floating around. We're not entirely sure how many different variants there are or what exactly the differences are, but it's very possible that these differences are relevant to bugs that only some people are seeing.

With that in mind, I'm looking to collect some data. If you could provide the following information from your device, whether or not you're experiencing a problem with CM10, it'd be very helpful. (I'll try to summarize the data received below as well, for reference.)

eyeballer has kindly set up a survey form for you to fill in, so that it's easier to sort through all the data: http://tinyw.in/I4OJ (if this doesn't work, try https://docs.google.com/a/teamw.in/...mkey=dHFhRDR5dzdVd3hfSTBvSnpjYVpna3c6MQ#gid=0). The instructions on how to get the requested information are in this post.

All of the lines below which look like

# command

are commands to be typed into a root shell, without the leading #. You can get a root shell in two ways: (1) connecting your tablet to a computer with adb installed and running "adb shell" from the computer, or (2) opening a terminal emulator on your tablet and typing in "su" (you may need to enable root access under Settings->Developer options first).

Motherboard serial number:

# cat /rom/devconf/MainboardSN
[you'll get a code [STRIKE]starting with "QI",[/STRIKE] such as QI13M9H72ZY (my device)]

Manufacture date:

# cat /rom/devconf/DateManufactured
[you'll get a date in American MM/DD/YYYY format, like 03/26/2011]

The motherboard SN and manufacturing date will help us establish when each variant might have been manufactured, and might eventually (with some luck) help us distinguish between variants.

CPU revision: The OMAP3621 chip at the heart of the Nook Color has gone through a handful of revisions to fix design defects (as nearly all CPUs do). We have to work around some of these defects in software when they're present, so it's helpful to know which variants are out there.

# dmesg

You will get a lot of output, but somewhere within the first 25 lines or so, you should find a line which looks like this:

<6>OMAP3630 ES1.2 (l2cache iva sgx neon isp 192mhz_clk )

(If you don't see it, reboot your Nook Color and try again -- if your device has been on for a while, older messages in the log will be dropped to make room for newer ones.) The code starting with "ES" is the revision number (1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 are documented).

(Shortcut: if you don't feel like sorting through all the output, you can run (on the tablet)

# dmesg | fgrep OMAP

which should show you the line above without some of the other noise.)

Touchscreen type: We know of two different types of touchscreen controllers shipped with Nook Colors, the Cypress Semiconductor "cyttsp" controller and the FocalTech "ft5x06" controller. Both should work, but they use different drivers, which probably have different bugs.

# dmesg

Some considerable way down from where you saw the OMAP chip revision, you should find output from both touchscreen drivers trying to load:

Obviously, the driver for the chip you don't have will fail to load. (In this example, the ft5x06 driver fails to load, so I have a cyttsp touchscreen controller.)

(Shortcut: You can also run

# dmesg | fgrep ft5x06_probe

You'll get a bunch of log messages if you have the ft5x06 touchscreen; if you have cyttsp, you'll get no output at all. Thanks to bowguy for the tip.)

What we know so far (we think):

About 75% of devices out there have OMAP36xx revision ES1.2, with the rest (so far, early-production models built January 2011 or earlier) having ES1.1. (Not all devices built in that timeframe have ES1.1 cores, though.)

The vast majority of devices have the cyttsp controller (present on devices built through at least mid-2011), but more recently built devices have the ft5x06 controller (also used in the Nook Tablet), as do some earlier builds which were later refurbished. Most of us who hack on the device have cyttsp touchscreens, so our kernel isn't as well-tested on ft5x06 devices -- feedback is much appreciated!

Motherboard serial numbers appear to all start with QI and are roughly sequential; no other structure seems apparent as of yet. There appear to be at least two different motherboards -- "QI", which most devices have, and "A6", from some devices made after mid-2011.