I received a promotional folder that plays a video with sound when opening the folder. This contains a rechargeable LiPo battery, a TFT display, a speaker, a power switch, a push button, 256 MB flash memory, RAM, and a CPU.
All of this for watching one 1-minute video.
What a waste! Certainly not environmentally friedndly. Until repurposed creatively!
On the back it says that the product can be sent back to the manufacturer for free recycling. Still I was wondering if I could do more with it.
Opening the delicate paperhousing is not recommended. I still went ahead and discovered:
- E200 chip, an Allwinner F1E200 system-on-chip with an ARM926-EJS CPU running at 470 MHz (Datasheet)
- Hynix RAM
- Samsung Flash
- 8 Ohm speaker
- LiPo battery
- Mini-USB connector
My device has two buttons, one that is depressed when opening the folder and a second one that is hidden inside the carton folder below the middle of the screen.
Connect to USB, wait until the charging battery icon is shown. Then press the button 13 times (not the power on switch but the one connected to TMC2 on the PCB). You will see "usb device is connecting now" and the device will be mounted.
- The video that is put into VIDEO/00.avi is played whenever the device is opened and the power on switch is depressed.
- If you put an additional video into VIDEO/01.avi, then it is played when the button inside the carton folder is pressed. If the button is pressed again, then the video is paused.
- You can attach more buttons and play additional videos like VIDEO/02.avi by attaching additional buttons to the PCB solder points TMC3 ... TMC 11 (I didn't verify all of them yet).
Note, the video doesn't really have to be in avi format, a YouTube Medium MP4 in 360p played just fine when renamed as above.
- Which OS is this running? possibly MELIS: Allwinner's self-developed OS for media players
- Can the boot logo be changed?
- Can a new OS image be loaded?
- Is there a serial port? (Probably yes!)
- Trekstor EBR30-a (TFT) (Teardown and boot messages)
- Prestigio 3884 TFT touch screen reader
@Archis19 there is actually a guy that goes by the username Unframework that has managed to reuse this screen by using Embedded Linux. You can see his first blogpost here and his second blogpost here.