[Arm-netbook] microSD breakout board, suitable for debugging using tablets.

[Alejandro Martínez]

Hi guys, I'm new here.

I bought a cheap-o Ainol Novo7Advanced tablet and have been playing with it
for a few weeks. Have managed to get a Ubuntu chroot up and running over
the Android firmware without much hassle, everything, including X11 over
the framebuffer, seems to work except for the touchscreen (the kernel
drivers don't seem to report events correctly for the Xorg module to
understand them).

Anyway, after some (failed) attempts of making the tablet boot using the SD
card as boot (so no Chroot needed), and trying it to show a framebuffer
console, became stuck with no output at all from the kernel.

So I've spent a while looking for some way of "breaking out" easily the
pins of the MicroSD to something usable without soldering on the tablet (or
even opening it) for debugging, with some instructions I found here.

Aaand... I've found it.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9419

It's intended as a "sniffer" device, but it gives me easy access to the
MicroSD pins which is what I wanted exactly.

I ordered it with a USB-Serial adapter, I'll keep you informed. I've
fiddled around with different tablet firmwares and they all have quite
similar hardware (making another tablet's firmware work is just a matter of
replacing the kernel and script0.bin).
If my "invention" works, it could possibly turn any cheap A10 tablet into
an interesting debugging device for kernel development apart from a A10
kit, or a working card release.


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Alejandro Martínez
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