yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Nook Touch General] spedinfargo:
Just got mine as well - SO love the fact that it's so easy to turn on developer mode and install apps - thanks for the confirmation. My needs are few: Calibre Companion, dropsync, web browser. I don't really need root either - I've been down the road of trying to push an ereader to its limits - I end up screwing around with the tech more than just reading. I'll also report back if I have any problems with any particular apps or if anyone wants me to try something out.

As far as reading, I can tell already that this is going to be a superior device than the Nook Glowlight Plus - that thing was slippery, weighted funny, the single non-physical button was frustrating as all get out. This really is the classic form factor of my all-time favorite Nook. I love the fact that I can turn the light on and off by long-pressing the N button again! And while I had long-since gotten used to not having physical page turn buttons, it is nice to have that option again - it might help with being able to navigate around other apps (rather Button Savior). The only small downside that I can see to there is no water-resistance - but that's not really important to me, esp. compared to the other upsides gained with this model.
[Nook Touch General] Windsor1959:
I went down the root road with the Glowlight Plus, trying to get Play Store to work - and losing root at every system update. It wasn't worth the bother. A few apps, like you say, and I'm good to go.

It used to be that Calibre Companion didn't work for long if Play Store was not installed on a device, as CC would "phone home" to make sure we were legit owners. Has that changed? I didn't install CC on the Glowlight 3 for that reason.
[Nook Touch General] spedinfargo:
I can't remember how I installed it (or what version) - I'm pretty sure it was a side-loaded APK, though, and it worked for me through the life of the Glowlight Plus without any problems. I do know that I purchased it, but I can't remember how the copy-protection worked.
[Nook Touch General] RyogoNA:
I would be very grateful if anyone could post hw info. I'm mostly interested in cpu and screen, and RAM.
[Nook Touch General] spedinfargo:
Wiki page: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Nook_GlowLight_3

Ram: 512? When I go to ReLaunch it shows Total: 460M / Free: 147M which I assume would be half a gig... (?)

Screen info (is this pretty much the same as the Glowlight Plus?):

Screen: 6" 300-dpi screen with built-in glare- scratch- and fingerprint-resistant lens provides a paper-like reading experience.

Resolution: 1072 x 1448 pixels
​

Is this helpful at all? cat /proc/cpuinfo:

Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 10 (v7l)

BogoMIPS : 1988.29

Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3

CPU implementer : 0x41

CPU architecture: 7

CPU variant : 0x2

CPU part : 0xc09

CPU revision : 10

Hardware : Freescale i.MX 6SoloLite NTX Board

Revision : 60200​
[Nook Touch General] RyogoNA:
too bad, I was hoping they upgraded it to 1gb.

cat /sys/class/graphics/fb0/xwi please, if possible.

oh... I was hoping for i.MX7. Well, not too bad still.
[Nook Touch General] spedinfargo:
Here ya go:

320_R187_AF0C21_ED060KG2C2_TC​
[Nook Touch General] RyogoNA:
Thank you. So, they've actually using new waveform oposed to Nook Glowlight Plus. I'm curious if they've implemented e-ink regal support.
[Nook Touch General] yegoshin:
anyone brave enough to pop theirs open and see if there is a UART possibility or not?
[Nook Touch General] RyogoNA:
Do you have any plan?)
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Of course!

It pops easily. Use a thin knifeblade to get it started then work a guitar pick around.

The TTY is easy and obvious, 3.3V, 115200 8N1.

root@ntx_6sl:/ #
[Nook Touch General] spedinfargo:
The APK that I had for CC didn't work with the newer version of Calibre content server so I did a little digging. Turns out that they fully support sideloading of Calibre Companion now!

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=273880&highlight=nook

The requirement for Google Play (GP) was removed in February of this year, in CC version 4.3.4.4. If a device has GP then GP must work. If a device doesn't have GP then CC deals with it.
[Nook Touch General] Windsor1959:
Thanks! I installed CC on my G-3 and it works fine. I appreciate the update.

Also, nice to see some more activity in the thread! Its starting to look like the old Glowlight Plus thread!
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
The six hard buttons are mapped in /system/usr/keylayout/imx-keypad.kl

LowerLeft 191 F9

UpperLeft 192 F10

UpperRight 193 F11

LowerRight 194 F12

Power 116 Power

Home 102 Home

You probably want to steal one for back.
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Well, I'm setting my old Glow Plus alongside the Glow 3.

The displays seem about identical.

The thicker bezel on the G3 is a bit annoying the same way it was on the NST.

Oh! No! They are using the same IR sensor as in the NST, not the capacitive from the G+!

Get your Q Tips ready to clean cruft out of the corners of the bezel.

Under some conditions it also throws a distracting shadow.

The bezel on the G3 is also bigger, especially on the top and bottom.

Having physical buttons is somewhat handy.

They are still using about the same hardware in the G3 as in the G+.

MCIMX6L8DVN10AB (i.MX 6 series 32-bit MPU, ARM Cortex-A9 core, 1GHz)

KLM8G1GEME-B0141 (8 GB eMMC)

Nanya NT6TL128M32AQ-G1 (512 MB DRAM)

Realtek RTL8189FTV (2.4GHz WiFi)

TI TPS65185 (eInk power controller)

Ricoh RC51619 (eInk controller)

zForce NN1001 (IR touch sensor)

zForce NN2003 (IR touch sensor)

In a lot of ways it's not a lot of progress.
[Nook Touch General] RyogoNA:
FYI, I've posted in Glowlight Plus topic links to TWRP recovery (and device tree), since HW in Glowlight 3 is mostly identical someone could try to build a recovery for Glowlight 3.
[Nook Touch General] vladimirmiff:
Does anyone know whether the Glowlight 3 runs Android 4.4 or a newer version?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Or you can download direct from the mother ship version 5.3:

http://su.barnesandnoble.com/nook/piper/5.3/jay/0.65/update.zip
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
I update the nook Book, but i won't boot past nook nu Barnes & Noble screen. Nor Will it show as connected devices. Any tips?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
That update was for the Glow3, BNRV520. That's what you have?

(B&N is really sloppy in making sure that the right update is used.)

How did you update? Put it on the SD card and wait for it to be discovered?

Does the display have some sort of animation moving?

Did you have a recovery on it?

If you reboot it enough times it should go there.

You did have ADB working before this? And now you don't?
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
Ai.. i have glowlight 3 plus. Had adb. Not anymore. And had twrp recovery. But i now nothing. Wrong update, because of wrong device. So did i blew it?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
So you have the 7.8" BNRV700, called "Glowlight Plus" by B&N but not to be confused with the much older "Glowlight Plus"?

We've been calling that the "Glow4".

(If you use Windows) Does it make any "bong" when you plug it in?

What is the screen showing?

There's always a way to get this going again, but in the worst case it's pretty difficult.
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
When i insert the USB in Windows indeed bong. USB device not recognized. And the ebook stays on nook nu Barnes and Noble. My device is a bnrv520.
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
Bnrv510
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
The only thing i got twice was: do you want to factory reset. I type yes, but it booted to same bootup screen. And it has been on that for 10 hours now.
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
So, it's a white 6" Glow2, BNRV510?

When it goes "bong" it would be nice to see if it's presenting a bootloader, a fastloader, UMS or ADB.

You can try http://www.temblast.com/download/usblog.exe

If it bongs but nothing shows in the log that means you have no driver installed for whatever just appeared.

P.S. If you paste anything just fuzz out the serial number (not that it's that big a deal).
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
I ll give at a go.
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
View attachment 5212047
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
View attachment 5212055
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
A "factory reset" won't help if it already has the wrong model.

If you ever get as far as semi-booting you can try to put the correct update on the SD card.

**** THIS IS FOR WHITE BRNV510 NOT THE MODEL ON THIS THREAD! ****

http://su.barnesandnoble.com/nook/piper/5.3/piper/0.69/update.zip

**** DANGER, WILL ROBINSON ****

Oh, your VID 0000 is totally broken.

0000 is about as "Onbekend" as you can get.

Try doing a long reset (holding the power button down for 10 seconds) and see if it will try to hit recovery.

You may have to do this 8+ times.

The worst part is that a wrong update will update the wrong u-boot which really screws things up.

The old NST were easy, they always exposed the (primary) bootloader on every boot.

On the iMX (Glows) if the u-boot loads you never see the (primary) bootloader.

If your unit were in my hands right now, I would disable the flash, hit the bootloader with the correct u-boot.

A completely broken u-boot is no problem. A u-boot that looks like it's correct but is broken is a big problem.

I actually totally break the u-boot on my device so that I can load whatever.
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
It triest to go to recovery but doesn't show up. But screen is black now.
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
To bad, nook screen is back
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
Are you willing to try and repair my device?and if so how can we arange this?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Ha! I would demand payment! In spekulaas!

If you are intrepid you could fix this yourself.

It will require opening the device carefully and shorting out stuff with a resistor.

It also would make life easier if you knew what a 3.3 V UART was.

Are you up for it?
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
never opened up an device before. And have no knowledge of 3.3 v uart. But would love to get the device in working state again.
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
Altho i won't mind paying in speculaas :)
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
I have An uart 3.3 v somewhere. Never used it before. Here it is. This what i need?
[Nook Touch General] dennisweelvdput:
I love to give it a try. Will check in tomorrow. Hope you Will have time to help me through the process. Tia for the help thusfar.
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Let's meet over here to get your Glow2 going: https://xdaforums.com/t/fixing-a-dead-glow-glow2-brnv510.4229851/
[Nook Touch General] dhiren26:
My Glowlight3, BNRV520 updated to App Version 53.0.67 / 5.3.2.36 from 52.0.77 / 5.2.4.27. It has removed Devanagari fonts NotoSansDevanagariUI-Regular.ttf that I had installed.
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Yeah, it does that. updater-script includes:

format("ext4", "EMMC", "/dev/block/mmcblk0p5", "0", "/system");
...
package_extract_file("boot.img", "/dev/block/mmcblk0p1");
...
package_extract_file("recovery.img", "/dev/block/mmcblk0p2");
...
assert(run_program("/system/bin/dd", "if=/cache/u-boot.bin", "of=/dev/block/mmcblk0", "bs=512", "seek=2", "skip=2"));

So it wipes out the whole system partition, the boot partition, the recovery partition and the u-boot

You'll just have to put the files back.

Next time you could unzip the update, put in your files, then zip it up again if you think it's worth it.
[Nook Touch General] Eadn33:
Didn't realize they were still releasing updates for the Glowlight 3, guess that explains my loss of root, loss of custom buttons and return of bootanimation problem? Can I prevent OTA update in future?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Yeah. Turn the WiFi off! :p

Mmm, try this, no guarantees:

# pm disable com.nook.partner.otamanager.OtaIntentService
[Nook Touch General] Eadn33:
Ha, thanks, I do keep the Wifi off most of the time to save battery, but need to turn it on when downloading books from the library.

I'll give disabling that a shot, although as it turned out it wasn't all that hard to reestablish my few customizations.

thanks
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
I find browsing for books painful even on a desktop.

I download Overdrive and Gutenberg to my desktop, then sync to devices over USB.
[Nook Touch General] Walter10h:
I just bought my Glowlight 3 BNRV520 and rooted it. Will I lose root if I update to the latest firmware?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Yes, as it wipes the boot image, the recovery image and the system partition.

If you like, you can download the update, unzip it, modify the script, zip it and manually install it using a recovery image.

(You may not be able to install it normally as the signing will be broken.)

The file you want is META-INF\com\google\android\updater-script

Delete this line and at least your recovery won't get overwritten:

package_extract_file("recovery.img", "/dev/block/mmcblk0p2");

Then you can use your (still intact) recovery to fix your rooting.
[Nook Touch General] klemperer:
I've rooted my GL3, installed my own launcher and reader. I am wondering whether it is possible to remove some NOOK apps/service to speed up the system performance, as I don't need the NOOK apps like Reader/Library etc. any more. Many thanks.
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
You can certainly rename/delete /system/priv-app/bnereader.apk.

You can't delete /system/priv-app/partner.apk as much of the system stuff that should be in framework.jar or services.jar ended up in there.

You can delete /system/app/CubeLiveWallpapers.apk & odex

You can use pm (the package manager) to disable a bunch of stuff.

# pm disable com.nook.partner/.FacadeLauncherActivity
# pm disable com.nook.partner/.OobeLauncherActivity
# pm disable com.nook.partner/.daydream.DayDream
# pm disable com.nook.partner/.oobe.OobeOtaActivity
# pm disable com.nook.partner/.oobe.WelcomeScreenActivity

Trivia (that I just learned) /system/app/MsgE6.apk is the NTX software responsible for the power down dialog.

Don't remove that!
[Nook Touch General] klemperer:
Thank you for your detailed reply. I will take a try later.
[Nook Touch General] Reatmos:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1brMwbao-cYVG2ovhzYntU0bbgSdL5APV/view?usp=sharing

New Version!! - 53.0.67
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Newer version: 53.0.87

http://su.barnesandnoble.com/nook/piper/5.3/jay/0.87/update.zip

Anytime you want to check the latest direct download of an update for Glow3:

http://www.nook.com/services/cms/doc/epd_ota/BNRV520_manifest_rel.json
[Nook Touch General] Reatmos:
OMG Thanks you for Sharing!! I didn't know that site
[Nook Touch General] Kramar111:
53.0.95 here :)

http://su.barnesandnoble.com/nook/piper/5.3/jay/0.95/update.zip

md5 635f926ec6d7505f60b022554c9dd184
[Nook Touch General] miles600:
As was possible with modification of the reader app on the original NST, has anyone managed to get the Glowlight 3 to refresh every page turn and if so how? Thank you for the help
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
Yeah, I don't know if B&N has gotten crazier with updates or if we just started noticing it more.

It seems a waste to download 200 Megs and do an update just because they updated a file or two.

If I had a better internet connection I'd track how many files actually change with each update.

@miles600 I took a quick look and it doesn't seem like there is a simple settings fix for page refresh rate.
[Nook Touch General] miles600:
Thank you for looking. It’s a shame B&N don’t follow Kobo and offer a greater level of user customisation
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
On my Glow2 with a non-stock reader app it never does a full refresh when turning pages on a book.

Did you want more or less page refresh?
[Nook Touch General] miles600:
I was looking to modify the Nook Glowlight 3 to refresh with every page turn
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
I'm surprised to find that I never did a deep dive on the Glows on Epd user APIs.

I did do that on the NST.

All that stuff is in android.hardware.EpdController in /system/framework/framework.jar

I recently did a display thing on an old NST.

Updating once a minute and never doing a refresh eventually the updated rectangle background turns whiter than the surrounding area.

I needed to do a full refresh myself.

On the NST:

EpdController epd = new EpdController(this);
epd.epdRefresh(TAG, EpdController.Refresh.REFRESH);

Edit: Since hardly any of the eInk is openly documented it's mostly a case of trial and error.

The previous specified GC_ALL only updates a subset of the display.

This is not apparent until after a few days of continuous operation.

On the Glows, I can't find anything similar.

It seems that the Glows takes a "hands-off" to Epd (eInk) management.

I'm still looking.
[Nook Touch General] RyogoNA:
AFAIK, there is nothing like EpdController on those new IMX-based Nooks. I believe it is because of the changes that were introduced since android 4.x.x.

So what they did in FW is that they modified base View class (from which every android control inherits). There is some sort of queue there which may call EPD refresh through API. But there is no way to call that API from outside plus there is some logic buried inside that API that does not guarantee that refresh call will actually refresh the screen. On some IMX-based reader FWs there are some APIs exposed on a view level that allow to change refresh mode for specific View (i.e. control or window).

All in all, for reader apps it is easier to just show a white filled screen for some duration to do a "refresh" than try to support every reader directly.
[Nook Touch General] Shagbark:
I'd love to disable the B&N launcher.

Is that what those shell commands do?

Do I need to root my BNRV700 for those pm commands to work? (I haven't.)

I ran them, but the nook rebooted and immediately went into the LOADING animation (and stayed there forever).

I had my nook using Text Launcher for a few days, but one day it just stopped booting. Now all it does when I turn it on is endlessly cycle the LOADING with the line growing left-to-right above it. I didn't even try to root it; dunno what went wrong.
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
You don't necessarily need to disable the stock launcher, but you do have to install your own.

Is ADB working? If it was working before it should still be working even though the bootanimation is playing.

Then you can install your new loader.

You can also just try this to see if everything is working:

C:\>adb shell
$ am start -n com.android.settings/.Settings
[Nook Touch General] Ryzir:
This is a shot in the dark but I've been using AlReader on my GL3 and I really like dark mode but the ghosting gets really bad after a few pages. Is there anyway for me to trigger fullscreen refreshes in ALreader? The default option "E-ink Refresh Rate" doesn't do anything.

edit:

I found an E-ink verson of AlReaderX that can be configured to flash a black screen every X amount of pages. It works great for Day Mode but in Night Mode it doesn't work as well probably because it needs to flash a white page instead of black in Night Mode.

I found the apk here: Mod Action - link removed

It's a russian forum but I'm going to see if I can communicate to have the E-ink refreshes be a white page for night mode.
[Nook Touch General] cde198:
Hello Guys, I would appreciate some help regarding Nook Glowlight 3.

TLDR: I want to read a book on Nook that is in foreign language (Marathi). After going through this thread I realized that its the issue with fonts. I made the changes suggested in this thread however its not resolved so I think I am doing something wrong or missing something.

Lil backstory (skippable)

I am very new to all this. I dont know much about unix/adb or how ereader work so please forgive my lack of knowledge.

So I got my hands on a Nook Glowlight 3 and I bought a book from B&N store. The book is in foreign language which is not rendering properly on nook. B&N support suggested only Reset/Hard reset/Reboot which obv dint solve the issue. So while reading, I found this thread where similar issue was resolved by @Renate . I followed his comments and made the changes however it is still not resolving my issue.

So to resolve the font issue, I made following changes:

Rooted the Nook

Identified the font that is present in the book

Downloaded that font from internet and copied it to /system/fonts/

Updated /system/etc/fallback_fonts.xml and added an entry for the newly added font

Restarted the device

I still see the same issue. I am attaching a few screenshots. Also, I can DM book details or share epub

I am pretty new to all this devices and technology so I could just follow steps and couldnt troubleshoot much so any help is appreciated. TIA!

PS: One particular thing I did not, at all, understand from Renate's comment was when he said "non-ui/elegant fonts will not be used by fallback file. Could my issue be related to this?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
It's been a long time since I've used a Glowlight 3 and even longer since I've used the B&N stock reader.

If you could point me to where I said what I said it would be helpful.

So, by Marathi you mean Devanagari, U+0900 - U+097F ?

Try the attached epub (just rename it from test.zip to test.epub).
[Nook Touch General] cde198:
Yeah, its been like 3 years since you helped the other person solve this issue. :)

In this thread on page 9 you were helping someone with similar issue - tinyurl.com/yc3v5tum

Yes, Marathi is Devanagari

I tried the test epub and the fonts dint load for this one - attaching the image

Just curious, if you dont use B&N stock reader, which one do you use/recommend?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
I dunno, maybe it doesn't like your font.

On my Windows I see U+0904 is supported in:

Nirmala UI

Nirmala UI Semilight

Noto Sans Devanagari
[Nook Touch General] cde198:
Thank you for your help! I tried with some other fonts as well but it dint work for me. I feel like I am missing something. If possible, can you take a look at the steps I did and help me point out if I am missing something. Or even point me to some resources that might help. I can see that I am asking alot but am not finding many resources around this
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
I don't know. Let's skip to the basics.

Name a file on your desktop in Devanagiri and adb push it to sdcard.

In your filemanager can you read the filename?

Get an htm file and push it, view it in the stock browser.
[Nook Touch General] cde198:
I could name a file in Devanagari and I could see its name in my File Manager.

However my web browser kept crashing so I couldnt test the HTML file.
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
That seems to show that Android is respecting the fallback.

You can try to take the fonts out of the fallback and see if that breaks it.

That will confirm that you didn't just make a type and fallback is broken.

The B&N stock reader uses different rendering than the normal Android so I'm not sure if it respects fallback.

If you use another reader app that allows selection of other apps that should work too.
[Nook Touch General] cde198:
Thanks, I will try it. Can you suggest any decent reader app for Nook Glowlight 3?
[Nook Touch General] cde198:
When I restored the original fallback file, I cant see the Devanagari letters in the File Manager. Its all squares. That means the fallback file did not have any errors?
[Nook Touch General] Renate:
So, it looks like your modifications were all correct.

And it appears that the B&N reader doesn't use the system fallback.

KOReader seems popular. ALReader exists.
[Nook Touch General] cde198:
I will try these readers. I hope they do well with the fonts! Thank you for your help Renate! I keep finding your posts from the past as I am looking into this stuff. You come across as a super knowledgeable guy. Respect!
[Nook Touch General] cde198:
Just wanted to update on my issue - I installed KOReader and all my problems seem to have resolved. I can read the Devanagari script without any issues in KOReader. I wish I would have found about the alternative readers at the start, however at least I learnt a few basic commands and connection with ADB which is noice!
[Nook Touch General] RyogoNA:
Same as NGP - 4.4.2