InVion GPS need help

Hi, I have buy this PNA and I would unlock the inside o.s. WinCe Net 4.2
Someone could help me, please?
Many thanks

read the posts in this forum and you'll see what "unlocking" means

Hey. Wow, its cool to see someone else actually bought this thing. I too bought a "SupportPlus inVion 4inch w\buttons".

Anyway, hacking it is patheticly simple. All you need to do is place a specially named exe on your SD card card and you are "in". When I first got my device a little over a week ago, I simply renamed a WinCE file explorer to "Alturion GPS.exe", rebooted and that was about it. From there I could just launch any program I wanted including the explorer.exe shell. The next day, I discovered an even better method that let me boot right into the H/PC shell as well as allowing me to leave the name of the GPS app unchanged. All you need to do is download the exe attached to this post.
This is just a tiny little program that launches the explorer.exe that is already in your device's Flash ROM.

Just rename it to ShincoUpdate.exe and put it in the root of your SD card. Now just reboot with the SD card inserted and you should be in the Explorer shell with a full desktop/taskbar and the ability to do anything you want just like any other H/PC. It even has a full control panel in ROM for some reason...

Now for the bad news...

While it is nice to have full access to the CE OS, you will start to notice something very, very bad as you start to install programs. RAM does not persist, so any files you place in a ramdisk folder like \Windows are lost as soon as you turn off the device! Now this is not so bad...Plenty of other WinCE based devices do not persist the RAM filesystem. On devices like this a common workaround is to just install programs to the SD card. Now you could do that if...(and here is the 2nd part of the bad news)... IT HAD A HIVE BASED(persistent file) REGISTRY! For some crazy reason the 400mhz inVion model stores the entire registry in RAM and so all user settings are completely lost as soon as you turn the thing off! This includes critical things like calibration settings, Owner name, etc! So if a program you wanted to run required a certain registry entry just to start, you woul need to REINSTALL it each time yo turn on the device. ;( You are essentialy doing what would be a factory reset on any other device each time you turn off the inVion. That makes the thing almost useless for running 3rd party programs and is why I am thinking about returning it. The sad thing is that the hardware is wonderful and is only limited by the badly implemented ROM it ships with. It has a really nice high resolution (480x272) TFT touchscreen, 64mb RAM and the hardware seems like it even supports suspend\soft reset like most other WinCE PDAs. More upsetting is that there is already an update ROM for the identical looking 200mhz model...but it seems the hardware may be very different and flashing this update could just brick the device.

Anyway, I wish you luck with your device and I hope for the sake of both of us that SHINCO(the real manufacturer) or SupportPlus offer a ROM update that at least fixes some of its worst issues in the near future.

Edited by TFGBD 2006-12-12 1:50 AM




Attachments
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autorun (launch explorer by anthema).rar (1KB - 14 downloads)

Here is an updated explorer launcher archive. I added toolhelp.dll to make life easier.



Attachments
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autorun (launch explorer by anthema).zip (3KB - 25 downloads)

Many thanks for your reply, I'm trying to made.

Do you think that would be possible to install TomTom sw?

It say: "shincoupdate is not valid CE application".

What do you think?

I have use another WinCe file explorer and now all ok, i can use WinCe OS.

How I can install TT5 now?

I have put TomTom 6 but I not find the gps port....

Hi, I have installed TomTom 6 on my PNA, work perfectly!

that's cool, you could detail the hack, so that others can do it too on their PNA's.

There is a more active discussion about this device including detailed instructions for getting TomTom running in this thread:

http://www.gpspassion.com/forumsen/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=72478

It works perfectly on a Tevion bought recently from Aldi! thanks a lot TFGBD

Hi all,

I have accessed the CE OS system of my Tevion PNA as TFGBD explained earlier. Neverteless, since the first access, the PNA loses the current date setting after each power off. Neverthelss there is something strange. All the other settings like language of the main menu, LCD settings etc. are correctly retained. Luckilly the navigation software seems to store everithing usefull on the flash. In order to recover to the initial state, I have tried to delete the autorun.exe an the helptool.dll but as I already thought it didn't help. Could you please detail a bit what how this registry thing is working and how is causing this problem. seems like launching this autorun very forst time changes something in OS for good. Is it really imposible to recover the initial status of the system? Thanks for the help!
Tevi

What is a Tevion PNA? You say Aldi now sells a device that is like the SupportPlus inVion 4 inch? Please provide some photos!


This Autorun.exe should not do much of anything. All it does it launch explorer.exe if it finds it.

Regarding the registry:
On the SupportPlus device, the Windows CE registry is lost each time you turn off the device so all system settings are also lost. There is no current way to fix this on this device. I do not know about your device. I need more information as I never heard of it before.

Edit: Ok, I found some photos of this device. This device is very different form the SupportPlus we have been discussing here. Your device may not even be made by the same company (Shinco) Does your device support suspend? Can you press a button and will it enter a low power state and let you resume by a second press of the button?

Edited by TFGBD 2006-12-19 3:49 PM

Hi TFGBD,

Thanks for the help! As I said, any info is more then welcome.

Unfortunately, I have just limited time for tweeking, since this device (turned out to be nothing else then a Myguide3000 or so) is ment to be a Xmas gift. Being a newbie in this field, when I saw on Aldi's advertisement that the device uses Igo, I thought that I could use my Igo maps for it. So I bought this insteed of spending 30€ more and buing a Mio PDA (which was the other option in this price range).

First I tried to place the additional maps on the /myguide/map directory of the SD . It turned out that the device is locked in the sense that it ignoes any other map then the three with which it's offered: I have got a small message about this at the start of Igo, for the rest it worked as before.

Next was to try to install igo (the kit that works for my PDA) without knowing that the OS is different then the one I have on my ASUS. To do this I bought a new SD card, I have placed on it the autorun.exe, toolhelp.dll to access the OS and the igo kit. Of course I got a bunch of error messages.

It is interesting to notice that the device, originally, starts up with a menu where you can choose between playing mp3s, videos, navigation and settings (language, time/dateand backlight of the main menu). Before accesing the OS for the first time, the date/time setting were retained in this menu. After accessing the OS for the very first time, the date/time settings were lost at each power off. Could this be? or it's just a trick of my stupid brain? The only setting which seems to be correctly stored is the language of the main menu. At the end of the day this is not a real problem since as soon as the navigaion program starts the system clock can be automatically syncronized.

Next step was to search for myguide on internet and I found this one:
[http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.php?catid=18&threadid=653493&lastpage=1]
Ok, this one is a different model but still, I suppose the processor and the OS are the same. Unfortunately it didn't work out either.

It's pitty cause the device is quite nice and the SirfStarIII receiver is super sensitive: none of the other devices I tested (my good old GPS mouse,a Fujitsu-Siemens PDA and a bluetooth GPS mouse) had 4-5 satelites with 50% strenght in my livingroom, next to my PC! I have some GPS signal even in the toilet (which is basically surounded by rooms, no external wall). Btw. I am not living on the top floor, there is one store above my appartment!

2 Conclusion. 1st:Santa will deliver this year a GPS without only 3 countries on it . 2nd: why bothering with PNAs when there are so many nice PDAs out there.





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DSC_6676.jpg (69KB - 2 downloads)