Mar 022013
 

As a result of some discussion on the Raspberry Pi forums, I decided to make my Pi into a dock of sorts for my HTC Desire.

Rather than using WiFi to connect to the Pi, I ended up using USB so that it doesn’t have to rely on anything external.

First thing I had to do was add this line into /etc/network/interfaces

iface usb0 inet dhcp

This let my HTC Desire assign an IP address to the Pi when I activated USB Tethering.
Second thing was to activate USB tethering itself after I plugged the phone into the USB Dock that I had.
Once the phone was plugged in, and USB tethering activated, the phone got an IP address on the usb0 interface.
Running ifconfig usb0 gave me this –

usb0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr ee:21:82:8b:eb:d1
inet addr:192.168.42.144 Bcast:192.168.42.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:616 errors:0 dropped:1 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:422 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:220596 (215.4 KiB) TX bytes:58184 (56.8 KiB)

As you can see, it has the IP address of 192.168.42.144 which has been assigned by the Desire.
I have installed a VNC server on the HTC Desire which allowed me to access the screen of the Desire, and also allows me to use my keyboard to do typing on the Desire.

The VNC server I used was called Droid VNC Server. Unfortunately it needs a rooted phone, but I had already rooted my Desire so it was no problem for me.
Once the VNC server was started, I used tightvncviewer on my Pi to access the VNC server on the Desire, and as you can see in the picture above, it’s very viewable.
Responsiveness leaves a bit to be desired, but it’s usable enough as long as you’re not playing games.

Share
Jun 072012
 

So I’ve had a HTC Desire for a little while now. I’ve rooted it, flashed it many a time, installed ICS onto it, and it is still working well. However lately, the phone has been turning off before the battery indicator got even close to 0%

I tried to look around on Google for a solution, and got many different answers, but none seemed to work consistently for me. Until I tried running it flat, and then charging the phone while it was off. In the end, after a couple of charges with the phone drained and turned off, it has recalibrated itself and now tells me approximately the right percentage of battery left. It turns off around 1% battery rather than 18% now, so it’s a lot better than before.

This is exactly what I did to get the battery indicator back to normal

  1. Use the phone as per normal, until the phone turns itself off at 18%
  2. While the phone is powered off, charge it up until the light turns green
  3. After the light turns green, turn it back on and use it as you normally would
  4. Keep using the phone until it turns off again. For me, at this stage the battery indicator had already improved a bit, but was still off
  5. After the phone has turned off a second time, charge it back up until the light is green again
  6. Once the phone has been fully charged a second time, the battery indicator should be back to normal

After I followed those steps, my phone was back to normal. However after a few weeks of charging it when it was not empty, it had gone back to turning off at 18%-ish. So once I repeated the above procedure, it’s back to normal.
If it doesn’t fix it straight away, keep emptying it and charging the phone while it is off, and eventually it will be back to normal.

The reason why the HTC Desire has this problem is that the battery meter relies on a ‘Coulomb Meter’ to measure how much battery has been used by the phone. If you charge the phone before it’s empty, eventually the coulomb meter gets inaccurate, and needs to be recalibrated. This is more of an issue when the phone gets older and the battery doesn’t hold as much charge as when it’s new.

Hopefully this has helped someone out there with an annoying phone that turns off at 18% battery.

Share
Oct 082011
 

As I recently posted, I also changed my boot screen on my HTC Desire, this is the second screen that comes up when you turn on the phone and is normally animated.

With the Telstra HTC Desire, the normal methods of putting a “bootanimation.zip” file into /system/media never worked for me, even after I rooted the phone.
I found out that the Telstra HTC Desire has a file in /system/customize/CID called default.xml which contains a set of lines starting with and ending with which sets the boot up animation on the Telstra HTC Desire.
Removing those lines from the default.xml file will allow you to put the “Bootanimation.zip” file into /system/media and the android_audio.mp3 file into the same location.
Once the files have been placed there, you will now get the new bootanimation instead of the Telstra boot animation.

Share
Oct 082011
 

I recently got the Android Modding bug, and wanted to change my Telstra HTC Desire’s splash screen.

This is the first screen that comes up when you turn on the phone, which is then followed by the boot animation, which I have also changed.
To do this, you will need to S-OFF your phone first, which will void your warranty.
Windows users will also need the Android SDK to get the fastboot tool that is used to flash the new bootscreen to the phone.
Linux users will either have to compile it from source or find it online as it’s not included in the SDK for some strange reason.

I used this Revolutionary to get S-OFF on my phone.
** I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO YOUR PHONE IF THIS IS ATTEMPTED **

With that out of the way, onto the fun bits.
Once the phone is S-OFFed, you will need to find or create a suitably sized BMP file to use as the splash screen.
For a Desire, this should be 480×800.
Once you have the image ready, use This tool – nbimg to convert the BMP file into one that is usable by the phone as a splash screen.

Once the image is converted, you will need to boot the phone into fastboot mode.
This involves powering it off, then holding down the volume down button while you power it back on.
While it’s powering on, plug the usb cable into the computer.

Once the phone is in the boot menu, which has a white background and little android robots on skate boards, you will need to select the top selection which should say “HBOOT” and press power. This should make it turn red and say “FASTBOOT” now.

Once it’s in fastboot mode, run this command from where the converted image and nbimg resides –
fastboot flash splash1 splash1.img
You will need to replace “splash1.img” with the filename of your splash screen.
It should output something like

sending 'splash1' (750 KB)... OKAY [ 0.125s]
writing 'splash1'... OKAY [ 0.218s]
finished. total time: 0.343s

Which means that you now have a new splash screen.
Select reboot in the menu and you should now see your new splash screen.

Share