How do I reflash the Omega2S in the Oboo paperweight (I mean clock)?

oracledude

I was a sucker and bought one of the Oboo clocks after having good experiences with the original Omega 1 & 2.
Within a week, this clock corrupted itself, showed a garbled screen, and rejected remote login, probably due to sshd not running/core dumped/whatever. Honestly I forgot the initial cause of failure - it was in 2019. Fast forward two years, and I find this paperweight sitting in my dead tech bin, so I figured I'd give it a try here since the Oboo site has been ignoring my Qs since day 1. I tried flashing the 2S in place with some alligator clips, but having no luck. So, short of desoldering it out of the mainboard, any ideas on how to get that firmware reflashed? It doesn't call home anymore, so the fancy remote setup on get-oboo.com doesn't work.

Please excuse the cynicism, but this thing is a $150 POS. Anybody want to trade a dock or two for it?

luz

There's quite some activity and discussions about Oboo initiated by Bradley Ouellette in this gitter community. Bradley also has a github repo with lots of useful info.

Basically, the Oboo as delivered did not allow ssh login at all, but one of the first things you'll find in Bradley's readme is how to get around this. Once you have shell access you can use scp and sysupgrade to flash any openwrt image.

Since Onion opensourced the Oboo, some contributions also got integrated into the official oboo feed, so you should be able to get some updates via opkg.

Unfortunately, I spend so much time doing other things with Omega2's all day, I did not find enough spare time so far to toy with the Oboo myself beyond enabling ssh to make sure I could reflash it if I want. So my Oboo is in the dormant tech drawer, not the dead tech bin

crispyoz

@oracledude I use my Oboo clock as my bedside clock, I love it because it's so easy to see without my glasses on. Once you fixed the ssh issue and replaced yahoo weather, it's great. My biggest complaint when getting started was getting used to the buttons on top, but after a bit of practice, it makes sense.

I know some people complain about the blue tooth streaming but I don't use it so I can't comment much on that.

Chris Ouellette

I would be interested in trading some docs for the Oboo clock. I have:
Omega2
Omega Exp doc
Omega 2 I2C shield
Omega IoT interface adapter

Let me know if you are interested.

T NT

@Chris-Ouellette

I could do with more documentation as well. I have no idea how to play audio from the command line on the Oboo clock. mpg123 is there and everything but there are no audio devices present. I have a sneaking feeling you need to use the mosquitto framework to use the audio but that is not terrible well documented and so not sure if I can do that from the command line easily.

So any central repository for docs would be helpful and know methods to access functions.

crispyoz

@T-NT My understanding is that the Oboo clock is a consumer device, so I'm not sure why @Onion would provide documentation on how to use the device from a technical perspective. When I remove the casing from my Blackberry KeyOne I don't expect BlackBerry to provide me with documentation on how to gain shell access to the device.

Since the Oboo utilises an Omega2S+, we can refer to the relevant documentation.