AGPTEK Rocker

[JimZipCode]

... but formatting might help get rockbox working.

Ok.

But as a quick check, does the upt file need to have any particular permissions on it, when it is loaded to the SD card?  Does it need "execute" permission?  The current permission set is rw-r-r.  Should I change it to include X, and try to update the firmware again?

[JimZipCode]

Alright, this behavior is more complex than I originally reported.

• I plug the Rocker into my laptop, with the player OFF.
• The screen lights up with the Rocker name, and after some number of seconds it switches over to a USB logo and says "computer connected"
• At that point I go to terminal in my laptop, and CD over to the SD card root
• I copy over the update.upt  (the .rockbox folder is still present).  I check the filename; and this time I made sure it had X permissions
• I eject the player
• After a moment the player displays the Rocker name, and then says "updating music files" and counts up, to however many thousand songs I have on the card
• That takes a couple mins.  Then the player goes to its main screen.  If I don't tough it right away, it shuts down

So at this point when I turn on the player, and then browse to settings - update firmware, it says there is no update.

Just now I tried it, but after the player finished updating the music files and shut down, I did NOT turn on the player.  Instead I plugged it back into my computer.  The upt file is gone!  It's already gone.  So whatever process reads my SD card and build its database, that process is already deleting my upt file before the player shuts down.

Do you have the player powered on, when you plug it into your computer?

[Milardo]

Not sure about the permissions as i didn't particularly change any and i just used the default settings in windows 10 where i put the 2 files in the sd card.

I have connected player both on and off and transferred files, but all this was done in windows 10 os. Do you have another computer to try it on that has windows os?

I did have a bit of trouble getting it to update though, sometimes i had to re put in the .rockbox folder. Also, i'm not able to use the usb mass storage feature, i put in the new update.upt file but the feature doesn't work yet i think?

[Roboturner913]

Alright, this behavior is more complex than I originally reported.

• I plug the Rocker into my laptop, with the player OFF.
• The screen lights up with the Rocker name, and after some number of seconds it switches over to a USB logo and says "computer connected"
• At that point I go to terminal in my laptop, and CD over to the SD card root
• I copy over the update.upt  (the .rockbox folder is still present).  I check the filename; and this time I made sure it had X permissions
• I eject the player
• After a moment the player displays the Rocker name, and then says "updating music files" and counts up, to however many thousand songs I have on the card
• That takes a couple mins.  Then the player goes to its main screen.  If I don't tough it right away, it shuts down

So at this point when I turn on the player, and then browse to settings - update firmware, it says there is no update.

Just now I tried it, but after the player finished updating the music files and shut down, I did NOT turn on the player.  Instead I plugged it back into my computer.  The upt file is gone!  It's already gone.  So whatever process reads my SD card and build its database, that process is already deleting my upt file before the player shuts down.

Do you have the player powered on, when you plug it into your computer?

I have also had strange issues after I plugged the player into my PC. Every time after I unplugged it would try to update the firmware and then it would go to the blue Agptek screen, then flash on and off until I turned it off. It would take 2-3 reboot cycles to get Rockbox to come back up.

I bought an SD card reader for adding music and started using an old phone charger to charge, so I don't have to plug into the PC anymore, and so far no more issues.

[alcaier]

I would think it is more likely that the file was never actually written to the tf card instead of it being mysteriously deleted. Tf cards can appear writable but actually fail to hold any data because there is usually cache being kept on you pc that gets written only after you "safely remove hardware" or umount. Also it is not unheard of that some card readers and tf cards just do not play well together and you can get only read only or seemingly random errors. The way I recall these flash devices are made they take any piece of waffer that can hold any amount of data and disable the blocks that do not work. So your 32gb tf might of actually been 128gb waffer. My understanding is that many of the cheaper brands do not correctly mark the blocks that are failing as the flash starts to wear out so get flash that has seemingly ever worsening dementia. I would stick with Samsung evo, Sandisk ultra and perhaps Kingston to increase your chances.

wodz: is there anything you need to debug this mass storage thing?

I did try to build obexftpd which could give another way to access files but I am having trouble building libglib. It seems more recent versions cannot be cross-compiled easily and I do not know what is the original version that they used. I think obex-data-server is also capable of serving files but might be even more complex to compile.

[breeman]

I'm loving having Rockbox on my AGPTEK Rocker, and despite it still needing work, is serving me very well! I do however, have a few notes of things that need fixing and features I'd like to see. This is by no means intended to pester wodz in getting it updated, I just wanted to share what I've found in testing it out over the past week in hopes that some of it will be fixed/implemented in the future.

--

If you're playing music, and want to search through your music to queue up more on your playlist, scrolling through a long list of artists/folders tends to freeze a bit unless you slowly scroll one by one. Scrolling while nothing is playing is perfectly smooth with no issues.

Date/Time is missing, so a Rockbox theme that displays the time at the top of the screen will just show --:----

Bluetooth feature is currently missing. (I know this is being worked on)

Plugging in to charge while listening to music works, but seems to stop as soon as it reaches full charge. The System info also doesn't display time remaining for the battery, just percentage.

Can't adjust volume on the system screens, only on the now playing screen.

Volume adjusts at very small increments so you have to hold volume up or volume down for a while to make a significant change.

Can't currently change font/background/selector colors in the theme settings as it seems the buttons haven't been mapped properly for it.

PictureFlow doesn’t work.

--

Again, I love that I have this on my Rocker now, thanks so much for the great work!

[wodz]

Thanks for pointing out what you found missing/annoying. Unfortunately currently I don't have time to work on rockbox. Hopefully this will change in coming weeks.

wodz: is there anything you need to debug this mass storage thing?

free time :-)

[JimZipCode]

I would think it is more likely that the file was never actually written to the tf card instead of it being mysteriously deleted. Tf cards can appear writable but actually fail to hold any data because there is usually cache being kept on your pc that gets written only after you "safely remove hardware" or umount.

Ding ding ding!  That seems to completely describe the behavior I was seeing.  I bought a new card (164Gb!), put the .rockbox directory on it and the upt file, started up and applied the update.  The player applied the update and then rebooted and brought up the boot selection screen, with the 3 choices for Rockbox, Tools, and the original firmware.

For those playing along at home: when I chose Rockbox, it then displayed an error saying "Cannot boot Rockbox".  I tried a couple times, also tried the "Tools" and that failed, then booted the original firmware.  But then I shut down and rebooted, chose Rockbox again, and it worked FINE.  So I guess it just needed an extra reboot after the update.

Thanks for pointing out what you found missing/annoying.

What I found annoying was the misbehavior of my effed-up SD card.   

Wodz, this port is wonderful.  I mean, I've only had it on my player for ~5 mins, only played one song.  But Rockbox looks beautiful on it.  It suddenly makes this player intuitive as hell, nicely responsive to its buttons, and just all-around awesome.  I can't thank you enough for the effort you've put in to make this happen.

Milardo, thank you too, for the work to make the port super easy to apply. 

I'm copying over the rest of my songs now.  Can't wait to use it!

[alex5908]

Hello everybody,
Could I get a piece of advice here?
Before rockboxing my T6 player could play files from 128GB microSD card. I tried 4 different cards of 128GB capacity. None worked. Now I can use only 32GB card. All the cards are formatted for FAT32. What shall I do?
I don't want to come back. I need rockbox.

[yzdev]

For those playing along at home: when I chose Rockbox, it then displayed an error saying "Cannot boot Rockbox".  I tried a couple times, also tried the "Tools" and that failed, then booted the original firmware.  But then I shut down and rebooted, chose Rockbox again, and it worked FINE.  So I guess it just needed an extra reboot after the update.

I noticed this behaviour as well (after each upgrade). So just start the original firmware once after a firmware upgrade, shut the player down and then start Rockbox.

[MrFoxhead]

It happened to me the first time I got the player and I was about to return it for something else... How foolish!
By the way, what I did was formatting the SD card to an 8GB volume and gradually expanded it, checking Everytime if it was able to read it.

[Roboturner913]

I've noticed that while playing and the screen goes dark, I can still faintly (very faintly) see the now playing screen. Possible battery drain? I don't know if this is an issue or problem, just thought I'd mention it.

[saratoga]

I've noticed that while playing and the screen goes dark, I can still faintly (very faintly) see the now playing screen.

That means the backlight is off but the screen is on.

Possible battery drain?

Usually not, but worth testing. 

[wodz]

Hello chaps,
With b9467e9347ba390bbd9b66e6581c50717a0beaef USB mode should work correctly. You need to perform full upgrade (.upt as well as rockbox.zip). I have only card formated as fat32 and with partition table so if you have exfat card and/or superfloppy formated please give me some feedback.

I also looked at problems with booting rockbox after upgrade. This is because OF upgrade procedure deletes /mnt/sd_0 directory (mountpoint for SD). It is recreated on first OF boot. It seems to depend on OF version if this dir is deleted or not during upgrade.

[squidman]

Hello chaps,
With b9467e9347ba390bbd9b66e6581c50717a0beaef USB mode should work correctly. You need to perform full upgrade (.upt as well as rockbox.zip). I have only card formated as fat32 and with partition table so if you have exfat card and/or superfloppy formated please give me some feedback.

I also looked at problems with booting rockbox after upgrade. This is because OF upgrade procedure deletes /mnt/sd_0 directory (mountpoint for SD). It is recreated on first OF boot. It seems to depend on OF version if this dir is deleted or not during upgrade.

So far it's working good. It should show up as b9467e9347-180406 in the Rockbox info tab right? Also I had to boot into the regular firmware first for rockbox to boot at all.