Archive for the ‘Dingoo A320’ Category

Display brightness control

Monday, July 27th, 2009

I’ve added a display brightness control menu to dmenu on my Dingoo, which makes it possible to easily adjust the display backlight brightness. The brightness setting will be saved to disk and automatically loaded on boot.
Here is what I’ve done to accomplish this.

First I have created two shell scripts. One for saving the new brightness setting (brightness.save) and another for actually adjusting the brightness (brightness.set). Both files need to be in the local/sbin directory.

brightness.save (56 bytes)

brightness.set (138 bytes)

Then I have added a new submenu to my dmenu.cfg with menu entries for various brightness settings (10 %, 25 %, 33 %, 50 %, 66 %, 75 %, 100 %). I have used a light bulb image as the menu icon. It needs to be in the res directory inside the dmenu folder.

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New Dingux released – Gmu update required

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

A new Dingux version has been released, which comes with a new rootfs. An EXT3 partition on the SD card is no longer needed. Actually EXT3 support has been dropped from the Dingux kernel in favor of FAT to make installing Dingux from Windows easier and reduce the kernel size. Due to other changes dynamically linked programs need to be recompiled for this Dingux version.
Here is a new Gmu release which is compatible with the latest Dingux release.

gmu_dingoo

To run Gmu extract the zip file to your SD card and execute gmu.goo in the Gmu directory.

gmu-0.7.0_BETA4-DINGOO-newdingux.zip (0.8 MB)

Gmu 0.7.0_BETA4 for Dingux released

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Here is another Gmu release for the Dingoo. Most notably it fixes an annoying bug where the backlight would not turn back on after a while when the hold mode had been enabled.

gmu-0.7.0_BETA4-DINGOO.zip (0.9 MB)

You need Dingux with a uclibc-based rootfs to run Gmu.

New Gmu beta release for the Dingoo (0.7.0 BETA3)

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Here is a new Gmu Beta release for the Dingoo A320. This release comes with some major improvements and bugfixes including:

  • Backlight power-off is now functional on the Dingoo (backlight will be turned off when the hold mode is enabled as well as after a configurable amount of time without pressing a button)
  • FLAC decoder now comes with meta data tag support
  • MP3 decoder does no longer crash Gmu with broken/invalid files

Gmu is highly configurable. It is always worth it to have a look at the README.txt file. Especially if you are having trouble running Gmu, make sure you have read the “Installation” section of the README.txt file.

gmu-0.7.0_BETA3-DINGOO.zip (1.0 MB)

I have added a script called gmu.goo to the archive, which makes it easier to run Gmu on Dingux. It does all the annoying stuff you had to do manually before. You can run that script from the command line or execute it from a file browser.

For those of you using dmenu on the Dingoo, you can easily add a Gmu menu entry to dmenu, by editing dmenu.cfg. Simply add a section like this to the appropriate section of the file:

MenuItem Gmu
{
    Icon = "res/explorer.png"
    Name = "Gmu Music Player"
    Executable = "/root/gmu-0.7.0_BETA3-DINGOO/gmu.goo"
    WorkDir = "/root/gmu-0.7.0_BETA3-DINGOO"
    Selector = no
}

In case you’ve extracted the Gmu zip file to some other location, you need to adjust the path accordingly.

Please make sure you are using the latest Dingux kernel. Otherwise the backlight power-off function won’t work.

Broken Dingoo SD slot

Friday, July 10th, 2009

The Dingoo is a really nice device, but unfortunately the MiniSD slot on my Dingoo got broken after a few days. As I did not want to send the Dingoo back and wait a month or so for a replacement, I decided to open it and check if it is repairable.

dingoo-sdslot_small

As you can see in the picture one of the pins in the SD slot has been bent badly. I was able to bend it back such that I could insert my MiniSD card and make it temporarily work again. There is no way of removing it without destroying the slot, though.
Two ideas how to solve that problem came to my mind. Either I could replace the whole slot if I find some place where I can buy a compatible slot that I could solder in as a replacement or I could try to solder a MiniSD-to-MicroSD adapter on top of the broken MiniSD slot. That way I would have a Dingoo with a MicroSD slot, which wouldn’t be too bad. If you know a place where to buy replacement slots or if you know if there are MiniSD-to-MicroSD adapters where one can remove the micro sd card without removing if from the MiniSD slot, please let me know. :)