hello. glad to make my first post interesting for you all.
i have had a j1s for one month and one day. over all it is not a bad machine but it is of course quite flawed. we have issues with the android firmware being unaccessible (not for me, however), and the marlin on the board being compiled without options to play correctly with octoprint, and the company not releasing recent source on github.
so i was running my machine as normal but i leave it running for days, even when not in use, until the ui becomes glitchy or becomes unable to correctly read gcode or print. after all it is only an android app running on an old version of android (7.1.2 nougat). during this time two things happened.
- it seems the touch interface was becoming more and more unstable.
- i wanted the machine to forget my wifi password (impossible as you will see, which is suspicious)
so on my final day of normal operation (2 days ago) i attempted a factory reset of the device to make it forget my wifi password, it refused to forget credentials and after running the stupid calibration routine three times with three factory resets the machine decided to boot abnormally the next time i started it.
i was presented with an error screen saying âwarning. the machine is not responding. would you like to reconnect?â i hit the reconnect button multiple times until the app crashed. i got an android errorbox saying fabscreen is not responding. i looked fabscreen up and saw its a snapmaker app for controlling the device.
since nothing was working i decided to explore the android system inside the device since it was clearly broken already.
steps to interact with android
- install usb hub, 1 usb keyboard, 1 flash drive
- hit key combination âwin + nâ to access notification bar
- access system settings from control bar
- go to storage and format the usb drive
- remove usb drive and place on one home launcher like smart launcher classic, and one file manager like xplore, and on app store like fdroid installer. i also added a navigation bar app called virtualsoftkeys.
- install the apps like normal sideloading, when installing smart launcher choose it as the default home
- reminder that the key combination to simulate a home button is âwin + enterâ.
now that i was inside the android and looking around i noticed many of the apps didnt like to work. they were already not starting which is why i had the fabscreen error. i also noticed that my wifi was still not forgotten by this dishonest version of android. so i did a normal android system factory reset.
after my factory reset there was 4 gb of data removed from storage and the j1 app and other stuff was now missing. unlike a normal android system image the critical apps were not rolled into the installation. so now i no longer have access to these.
what did i do then? sent an email to tech support asking for a .img of the android install file since my android is corrupt anyway, and i need also the apps to make the printer run.
but since im bored i decided to try octoprint for android.
the good news is that it works but you must connect a usb cable from the back of the machine to the front. the bad news is that my usb webcam made the system crash when i tried to make octoprint recognize it. the ugly is that during a test print i realized a lot of stuttering and pauses that caused blobs and bad looking areas on my test print. this can maybe be fixed later with some tweaks.
having accomplished this i would ask any j1s friends to enter their android and attempt to backup or copy the apps to make this system run. im not sure if i only need the j1 app.
ultimately since i bought this machine on amazon, if i cant recieve a solution before my return date i will simply be exchanging it for a new unit and hoping that one doesnt malfunction the same. but i wil lalso not make the mistake of connecting it to the internet. android 7.1.2 with a security update from 2018 does not belong on my network and i am think maybe there was some security vulnerability that caused this issue in the first place for me.
maybe i will attempt to root this device. i havent taken the floor from the printer yet. there is no adb mode settings in this thing so there is likely a serial connection somewhere that would allow me direct hardware access.
