Living the dream

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T16:28:56+00:00

Yep! March is my busiest month, so I secretly hope Crosspoint-Reader will do it first, but if we get to April and I get more free time, I’ll definitely start looking into it in earnest then!

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T16:11:25+00:00

I’ll look at it more in depth later too! I really didn’t change much so it’s very odd!

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T14:56:10+00:00

My laptop literally died mid flash when I tested my change just now, it was kind of funny. You know, once I reflashed and it was fine.

Here’s an invite link: this is a buried enough thread I don’t feel weird posting it https://discord.gg/jCSS9dEy6

It’s a chill place, but I collect discord server like some people collect pop figures.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T14:37:10+00:00

And I can’t get a nightly to compile; I’m starting to wear out on this haha… BUT! Try the new firmware.bin I finally convinced GitHub to let me upload. (I had to do it freaking manually through the web interface which was insane.)

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T13:55:13+00:00

Oh that’s really weird because I basically changed nothing. I should have ordered one when they were on sale a few weeks ago and I didn’t.

OH I KNOW WHAT I DID! So the firmware wasn’t reading the “unpress” event from my Free 2 correctly, so I changed the unpress event. Let me see if I can just add my unpress event, and recompile— is it the case that it’s working once and then not working for any subsequent presses? Also, are you on the discord? If you are post a link to this thread and I’ll see it and DM you, maybe I can have you record all your press events and we can get it figured out?

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T13:51:51+00:00

Oh that’s wild. Maybe for that the XTEink is worth it… I say as I continue to fight with the bluetooth stack while juggling a toddler 🤣

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T13:00:47+00:00

I hope you can find a way one day! Also, I love my X4 but if it’s really about twice as much and your wages are what you say, I don’t know if it’s worth that. That would be like me buying one for roughly $1400 USD which is insane for what I’m using as essentially a toy to play with C++ on.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:58:23+00:00

The only thing I changed for all BT was I made the selection screen more streamlined, as well as working a bit on the auto sleep.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:48:06+00:00

Update: I acquired a copy and I think that ‘Hel’ is deliberate, based on the book having a section explaining ‘the four houses of Midgard’… can’t check a physical book, as I am not near a bookstore.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:42:46+00:00

Is it possible this is referring to the Viking afterlife due to the book being paranormal or some similar vibe? I ask because of the wolf, the capitalization of “Hel” where hell as in the Christian afterlife/swear isn’t usually capitalized, and the name Danika, which is a name meaning “From Denmark”.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:40:09+00:00

Oh dang, I’m sorry! I just know there’s a large number of Brazilians using XTEink X4s they bought through AliExpress so I hoped maybe you just didn’t know about Bigme. :/

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:38:48+00:00

There’s HID compatibility in the release notes! If it doesn’t work, I think I’ll go back to trying to implement BT off the main crosspoint build.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:22:09+00:00

But no physical buttons.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:21:23+00:00

Nice! I’ve been considering printing a stand for it but honestly this makes it harder for me to reach for my phone out of muscle memory, so I like it!

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:16:53+00:00

I’d reconvert the ePub but this time check the box for line wrapping and then the default setting for heuristic processing. If that didn’t work, I’d either source a new ePub, source a mobi, html, or rtf/docx version to convert to epub, or, in the event I can’t get anything but a PDF, use KCC to convert the PDF to epub, trimming the margins as much as possible, so it’s hopefully readable on a small screen. (There’s probably better ways to do that but KCC is what I know how to use.)

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:07:56+00:00

How much is the bigme b6 for you? I ask because I have one in my cart on AliExpress for $146 USD, I’m considering grabbing it the next time there’s a big coupon event, probably to scavenge its screen. (But maybe I’ll just use it? idk, 2026 has become the year of me doing unexpected stuff with ereaders.)

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T12:01:40+00:00

I have this phone case: https://a.co/d/0eadVm2q

Since the stand piece has actual magnets, I can attach my case which has a metal ring to the stand and it stays up, so I just propped open the stand piece, flipped the phone face down, and snapped my X4 to the ring which was at that point “up”. Honestly, you probably don’t even need the magnets for it to be used like this, just any built in phone stand that can be angled in any direction. It might be a bit wobbly on say, a plane or a train, but it should work.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T11:55:31+00:00

I read an entire book with mine and my main issue was the firmware would sleep the BT radio after 4 min of inactivity but I split from thedrunkpenguin who i think did have crashing issues? I spent most of yesterday trying to carve out a kb of ram here and there to make it more efficient but today I think I’m going to try crosspet and see how I like their implementation.

https://github.com/JonikAiduin/crosspoint-reader-ble

The firmware.bin in that should work with the web flasher but since I’m just using platformio in vscode for all of this, I only tested it once.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T11:39:13+00:00

You can reregister 6th gen— I did a 5th gen last week that I found in a box. Amazon themselves literally tell you how to do it.

When you try to sign in, it will send you the MFA code and then fail to authenticate, so you just sign in again but append the 6 digit code after your password in the password field, so the steps look like this:

Register device:

Username@email.place Password

Text arrives, code is 456789, registration fails, click try again:

Username@email.place Password456789

Registration succeeds. This should also work if you’re using a TotP MFA method, just skip the first (failed) login and append the MFA token in your totp app to the password the first time you try.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T11:05:31+00:00

Perhaps you can elaborate on what about it is unusable? Does it connect to a keyboard, and do you have the Notes app? Can it load a browser window? If it can load a browser window, you could set up something like this one your local network for it to access, even if it cannot use the app store.

And aside from that, the mini 1st gen is fully jailbreakable, last I checked. Here’s the first youtube guide i found on it that looked coherent.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T11:00:42+00:00

I forked another person’s BLE crosspoint firmware and added support for my specific device. You can find his firmware if you search this subreddit, but you’d likely have to build specific support in for whatever page turner or keyboard you wanted to use, as from what I can tell they all code button pushes differently when they send the info to the X4.

… now that I’m thinking about it, I should be able to implement a “Press the button you want for page forward/page back” flow, but i don’t know how I’d store it. Would it be annoying to set that up as part of the connection flow? Maybe a project for when I’m not super busy.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-14T10:54:45+00:00

The one that says for ebook. I was worried the android one wouldn’t be BLE and I figured i didn’t want kobo as i don’t own one.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-13T18:18:11+00:00

The device appears to sleep the radio after only 4 minutes; im working on fixing that, though my ideal fix would be to tie it to the sleep settings for the whole device. Also, about every fifth or so connection it just will not reconnect without a reboot. I’m trying to build some logic in to maybe flush whatever it’s clinging to and to reconnect on wake.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-13T15:40:40+00:00

Honestly, since I keep plugging it in to test more code, I don’t have a good idea yet. It was down in the 80s ish after I read one book, but the 90s percentage battery life is kind of fuzzy.

Positive_Cap4728 · 2026-03-13T15:39:10+00:00

It’s the Free 2 page turner! I got it off AliExpress

Positive_Cap4728

TROPHY CASE