Renate’s Ultimate Hacked Nook Touch

I haven’t been keeping up with news at XDA Developers forum so I missed the lead up to what follows, the ultimate hacking of a Nook Touch.

XDA Developers forum Member Renate has hacked the hell out of her Nook Touch, making it do things I never thought possible, like:

• 24-bit audio recording
• playing MP3 audio
• Skype chats
• using a GPS puck

And that’s just for starters!

Her hacks are all over XDA and in this post I will attempt to order them in a way people can understand and easily find them.

Stock Reader page turn refresh rate

Some people might want to change how often a page turn in the stock Reader app does a full refresh.

In the very long thread [WIP] USB Host support (working), she has several things happening, and I’m highlighting the posts that mention these:

How to make your own USB OnTheGo cable out of existing stuff you probably already have, as well as how to make a powered USB hub (here is the schematic):

And here is a YouTube video someone else found about how to create a USB OTG cable:

And its companion post.

This is the USB OTG cable Renate bought and confirms works:

And it has an Amazon listing.

Getting a USB keyboard to work consistently (note that a USB OnTheGo cable is required) — and a refinement of that method

Keyboard mapping files for a USB keyboard:

For those who did get a USB keyboard working there are two map files which could be updated to something sane.

A dissection of getting USB host to work on the Nook Touch — this is mainly for tech wizards

USB thumb drive working via a hub

This is the audio hardware Renate is using: 3D Audio Sound Card USB Adapter or get this one at Amazon. Note that someone else confirms this expensive one also works.

The hacked kernel that is required

Getting the Nook Touch to play MP3 audio

And screensnaps from her USB Mode utility (use the updated version here):

Here is someone else’s picture of a Nook Touch using the audio hardware:

Steps to get the USB audio hardware to work

A free app to control audio volume

Getting Text To Speech to work

Hacked asound.conf file

I can get good 16000 recordings through AudioRecord

Chatting on Skype

So I was chatting with this Chinese lady.

She was very patient even though I kept calling her and my Chinese is poor at best.

Of course she is the nice lady on the Skype loopback test.

(The Chinese one seems to work more reliably than the English one.)

What I mean to say is that Skype works fine.

A mod to prevent rotating the arrow keys when in landscape mode

App that can record 24-bit audio

Screensnap:

Then Renate gets into the hardware hacking, starting with: I drilled a hole in my Nook!

Besides reading books, I use my Nook for display of my guitar transcriptions with lyrics and for recording 24 bit audio.

I don’t use a builtin mic, I use a Shure SM58 (standard stage mic) and a Lexicon Alpha USB interface.

I haven’t really ported my guitar transcription display program over to Android yet as it’s actually quite complicated.

I format songs as PNGs on my desktop and then have a simple program on the Nook that can scroll them.

I have a database front-end for looking up songs that’s actually more convenient than anything that I have on my desktop.

So she can use the Nook Touch on a camera stand like this:

And here is the stand shown in the opening photo in this post:

This is its Amazon listing.

But wait! There’s more!

Making a foot pedal

For quick and dirty it’s nice to have a single pedal that just generates keyboard commands.

You can select whichever keystroke you like, but PAGEDOWN, SPACE, PLAY/PAUSE or FXX might be a good choice.

That foot pedal could be a boon for those who are disabled and cannot use their hands to read.

If all of that doesn’t add up to the Ultimate Hacked Nook Touch, I don’t know what does.

Besides all of the above, here are the XDA threads that Renate originated that might contain other useful information.

Well done to Renate. She has to be the ultimate Nook Touch hacker!

Previously here:

B&N Nook Touch Rooting category