[Android General] Tzul:
[MENTION=7184758]charlestek[/MENTION] Just type "@username", e.g. [MENTION=5919159]Tzul[/MENTION], and that user will get a notification.

Yes, the SPFT can access the entire "hard disk drive" (flash memory) of the tablet. Not just the OS bits, but everything.

I forgot to mention last time that some devices are "locked", particularly those you get with a contract from a carrier. This means that you are not allowed to change certain things, like flash a custom recovery. This is enforced by cryptographic signature checking (e.g. the custom recovery couldn't be installed because it's lacking the proper signature, which you cannot recreate, as you do not know the secret cryptographic key for building the signature; and even if you could somehow flash the recovery, it probably wouldn't boot, as the bootloader would also check the signature).

This tablet is "unlocked", of course. I have never seen a locked MediaTek-based Android device, but the possibility exists. In that case, the SPFT might not be allowed to flash every partition, or maybe it would flash, but the result then just wouldn't boot, who knows...

I'm not sure that the USB power is enough for the SPFT flashing process. I think I saw a setting concerning flashing without battery somewhere in some SPFT config file. Might work for some older, simpler platforms, but in general, I think you should have a sufficiently charged battery if you're going to use the SPFT. I'll try it on my phone without battery next time and will report back.

[MENTION=1454767]Old faithful[/MENTION] Yes, you can program the PMU (power management unit), but this is very low-level hardware stuff. I've actually done that on an old, Chinese tablet I once had. Found the datasheet of its PMU, and an interface to its registers in the Linux SysFS, and therefore was able to write a shell script that could read and write various info. I could change the charging current from a measly 300 mA to above 1500 mA, and the target voltage from 4.2 V to 4.1 V, among other things. I learned quite a bit from this, for example that a battery's state-of-charge is quite difficult to determine, therefore battery percentages are notoriously inaccurate. That PMU had an integrated "fuel gauge" register for the battery percentage, but the kernel drive chose to do its own calculations. The battery percentage by the driver could be off by up to 10% from the percentage calculated by the PMU itself...

Chargers (I prefer to call them power supplies, because that's what they are... the actual charging is handled by the PMU inside the tablet) should not go up in smoke when a device wants to draw as much power as it can. What happens is that the voltage will drop, and at one point it will be too low to be usable. But with cheap no-name electronics, you never know, they really might catch fire...

Yes, system upkeep is usually prioritized. That is, if you connect a power supply while the device is in use, the power will first be used to run the system, and only the remaining power will be routed to the battery for charging. It actually can and does happen that the battery gets discharged while a power supply is connected, namely when the system requires more power than the power supply can provide. It's therefore always a good idea to not use a device while charging, if you want it to charge as fast as possible.

But this is not what happens with this tablet...

I monitored the values in /sys/class/power_supply/battery/uevent (which is where apps such as Battery Monitor Widget actually get their information from), but next charge cycle I should use an external voltage and current meter for confirmation.

Same thing happened to me when I was trying to use my TWRP 2.8.7 for Android 4 with Android 5. I assume it has something to do with the fact that Android 4 on this tablet uses a 32 bit Linux kernel while Android 5 uses 64 bit...