I received my walmart WPDN R7T40WWHF1 yesterday, and started to analyze it to see if we can do anything about the bricked units and also decide if mods are safe and perhaps cook some up if needed.
It looks very much like my other WPDNs, has the same accessories,same charger NO charger is different, it has a 5v charger, not a 12v charger like the older units. I haven't opened it up to see if it is different or not. From the outside, it looks and smells the same.
ADB does work (as expected) and I searched everything for a copy of the original firmware, and there is none on the unit. This is different from the other WPDNs, which had a copy of their original firmware on their internal sdcard.
Tried the pc updater on the Pandigital web site, and it said no updates were available for this model. Browsing the updater found no models for firmware versions that appeared close. As we already knew, there is nothing on the mirror site either.
THANKS PANDIGITAL, ONCE AGAIN YOU HAVE SCREWED YOUR CUSTOMERS leaving them no way to recover a messed up unit. Either they are just slow releasing it, or this is intentional to try to stop anyone from making modifications. It is a short-sided decision, as we have already seen the bricked units being returned when they probably could have just been reflashed to fix them. But for $67, what do you expect?
I put in busybox so I could get some additional linux commands going that I needed, and searched around a bit. While the firmware was not there, there was a flash log file there that indicated the firmware file name they used was:
C1SL20_20120224_B_PD_INX7E_ENG_6410POP.zip
Not sure what the C1 means but we knew about the SL_20_20120224 part from the settings panel. Looks like they may have flashed from an external sdcard initially then removed it?
There is a new fused section /cache which does have a zip file in it, but that zip only has the user apps and the initial user data in it, nothing really of value.
Bottom line seems to be that until we can find the firmware zip for this thing, we are probably on hold.
If someone wants to send me a bricked unit, I would be willing to try to manually fuse a recovery image into it which might get the unit back enough to put one of the 2011 firmwares in it until we can do better.
I did snatch the user & system apps out of it, the build.prop (nothing unusual there), and the framework - all with an eye towards a set of modular flashes for gapps etc like we had for the 2011 versions. I could proceed with this, but with no firmware available to flash back to if something goes wrong, I am reluctant to do this and would still consider any updates to these units on hold till further notice.
I am going to update the wiki a little bit with some info about this box and point it to this thread.
It looks very much like my other WPDNs, has the same accessories,
ADB does work (as expected) and I searched everything for a copy of the original firmware, and there is none on the unit. This is different from the other WPDNs, which had a copy of their original firmware on their internal sdcard.
Tried the pc updater on the Pandigital web site, and it said no updates were available for this model. Browsing the updater found no models for firmware versions that appeared close. As we already knew, there is nothing on the mirror site either.
THANKS PANDIGITAL, ONCE AGAIN YOU HAVE SCREWED YOUR CUSTOMERS leaving them no way to recover a messed up unit. Either they are just slow releasing it, or this is intentional to try to stop anyone from making modifications. It is a short-sided decision, as we have already seen the bricked units being returned when they probably could have just been reflashed to fix them. But for $67, what do you expect?
I put in busybox so I could get some additional linux commands going that I needed, and searched around a bit. While the firmware was not there, there was a flash log file there that indicated the firmware file name they used was:
C1SL20_20120224_B_PD_INX7E_ENG_6410POP.zip
Not sure what the C1 means but we knew about the SL_20_20120224 part from the settings panel. Looks like they may have flashed from an external sdcard initially then removed it?
There is a new fused section /cache which does have a zip file in it, but that zip only has the user apps and the initial user data in it, nothing really of value.
Bottom line seems to be that until we can find the firmware zip for this thing, we are probably on hold.
If someone wants to send me a bricked unit, I would be willing to try to manually fuse a recovery image into it which might get the unit back enough to put one of the 2011 firmwares in it until we can do better.
I did snatch the user & system apps out of it, the build.prop (nothing unusual there), and the framework - all with an eye towards a set of modular flashes for gapps etc like we had for the 2011 versions. I could proceed with this, but with no firmware available to flash back to if something goes wrong, I am reluctant to do this and would still consider any updates to these units on hold till further notice.
I am going to update the wiki a little bit with some info about this box and point it to this thread.