I was one of those waiting for the closed kindle 5.6.5 jailbreak so when that fell through I decided to have a go at opening the PW2 and installing the jailbreak via the serial port.
I have several PW2s so I was keen to get on with it.
First up, opening the PW2 is a lot easier than I thought it would be. The plastic bezel which has to be lifted is very tough and flexible and there is little to no chance of breaking it. The biggest risk is to damage the screen but with a bit of care and by going slowly that risk is fairly small also. I read elsewhere on this forum that using a heat gun or hair dryer makes it easier and that is certainly my experience. It also makes reassembly easier to heat the kindle and the bezel (and hence the residual glue) before snapping the bezel back in place.
After doing the first PW2 I found it easier to lift the bezel by doing the top edge last. This is because there is some pretty tough double sided sticky tape under the top edge and it is easier to work the bezel free by lifting it evenly across the full width. Anyway, there is a fairly high chance that the tape might tear a little but it is not a problem for reassembly. The rest is straightforward.
I used a TTL-232RG-VREG1V8-WE usb to serial cable with an ftdi chip in it. The cable has six open tinned wires on the serial end.
For the first PW2 I soldered wires to the serial pads. I have got a really good temperature controlled fine tip soldering iron and a decent desk top magnifying glass but because I am left handed and the pads are hard up against a metal cover I found it very difficult to do the soldering. With some perseverance I did succeed and by connecting ground, tx, and rx only (no other voltage connections required) I succeeded in getting the jailbreak installed.
I have a windows 10 pc and I was running Teraterm as the serial program interface. The TTL-232RG installed automatically and Teraterm found it on a usb com port ok. However, when I first connected the usb to serial cable and set Teraterm to 115200 I was getting immediate key responses but it was gibberish. It took a couple of 15 second reboots to get the PW2 and Teraterm to sync properly. This was probably a timing error on my part but eventually the link settled down and was flawless. I also found that I had to be really quick after a reboot to hit an enter key to get into uboot.
Back to the point of this post. I wasn't looking forward to wrestling with the soldering iron for my other PW2s so having realised I only needed two 'difficult' connections for tx and rx (earth connections are available in many places - eg, on metal covers, on screws, and solder pads) and that I only needed those connections for a couple of minutes I devised a simpler method which was OK for a temporary connection - see photos.
I simply sticky taped a piece of high density foam to the top of a cover next to the serial port pads and used the foam to support two sewing pins that are pushed through the foam and down onto the tx and rx pads. The big breakthrough was that when I raided my wife's sewing box I found both an orange and a yellow pin which happen to be the wire colours for rx and tx on the usb to serial cable! The pins push into the solder enough to make the connections more than good enough to do the job. It takes only a few minutes to get the jailbreak installed (note: the jailbreak was preloaded via the normal usb connection and the password was pre-caclulated using:
print("fiona%s"%hashlib.md5("905A22014516049H\n".e ncode('utf-8')).hexdigest()[13:16])
on an IDLE platform.
I don't know if it is a feature of the TTL-232RG cable or not but it helped only having to use three wires. The earth was easy as it was just clipped onto a screw head as in the photo. So it comes down to just getting two connections in place and that turns out to be very easy also.
I hope this helps someone else get the job done.
I have several PW2s so I was keen to get on with it.
First up, opening the PW2 is a lot easier than I thought it would be. The plastic bezel which has to be lifted is very tough and flexible and there is little to no chance of breaking it. The biggest risk is to damage the screen but with a bit of care and by going slowly that risk is fairly small also. I read elsewhere on this forum that using a heat gun or hair dryer makes it easier and that is certainly my experience. It also makes reassembly easier to heat the kindle and the bezel (and hence the residual glue) before snapping the bezel back in place.
After doing the first PW2 I found it easier to lift the bezel by doing the top edge last. This is because there is some pretty tough double sided sticky tape under the top edge and it is easier to work the bezel free by lifting it evenly across the full width. Anyway, there is a fairly high chance that the tape might tear a little but it is not a problem for reassembly. The rest is straightforward.
I used a TTL-232RG-VREG1V8-WE usb to serial cable with an ftdi chip in it. The cable has six open tinned wires on the serial end.
For the first PW2 I soldered wires to the serial pads. I have got a really good temperature controlled fine tip soldering iron and a decent desk top magnifying glass but because I am left handed and the pads are hard up against a metal cover I found it very difficult to do the soldering. With some perseverance I did succeed and by connecting ground, tx, and rx only (no other voltage connections required) I succeeded in getting the jailbreak installed.
I have a windows 10 pc and I was running Teraterm as the serial program interface. The TTL-232RG installed automatically and Teraterm found it on a usb com port ok. However, when I first connected the usb to serial cable and set Teraterm to 115200 I was getting immediate key responses but it was gibberish. It took a couple of 15 second reboots to get the PW2 and Teraterm to sync properly. This was probably a timing error on my part but eventually the link settled down and was flawless. I also found that I had to be really quick after a reboot to hit an enter key to get into uboot.
Back to the point of this post. I wasn't looking forward to wrestling with the soldering iron for my other PW2s so having realised I only needed two 'difficult' connections for tx and rx (earth connections are available in many places - eg, on metal covers, on screws, and solder pads) and that I only needed those connections for a couple of minutes I devised a simpler method which was OK for a temporary connection - see photos.
I simply sticky taped a piece of high density foam to the top of a cover next to the serial port pads and used the foam to support two sewing pins that are pushed through the foam and down onto the tx and rx pads. The big breakthrough was that when I raided my wife's sewing box I found both an orange and a yellow pin which happen to be the wire colours for rx and tx on the usb to serial cable! The pins push into the solder enough to make the connections more than good enough to do the job. It takes only a few minutes to get the jailbreak installed (note: the jailbreak was preloaded via the normal usb connection and the password was pre-caclulated using:
print("fiona%s"%hashlib.md5("905A22014516049H\n".e ncode('utf-8')).hexdigest()[13:16])
on an IDLE platform.
I don't know if it is a feature of the TTL-232RG cable or not but it helped only having to use three wires. The earth was easy as it was just clipped onto a screw head as in the photo. So it comes down to just getting two connections in place and that turns out to be very easy also.
I hope this helps someone else get the job done.