egh/neotools

NeoTools

Command-line tools for AlphaSmart NEO.

This project aims to provide common functionality like file management, as well as access to the low-level system details. The device driver has been ported from AlphaSync.

Commands

Read file by index.

> neotools files read 1
Once upon a time...

Copy all files to the directory, preserving their names.

> neotools files read-all --path archives/
> ls archives
'File 1.txt'    'File 3.txt'    intro.txt

Write file to Neo

> neotools files write notes.txt 1

Inspect applets and manage their settings

> neotools applets list
[
  {
    "name": "System",
    "applet_id": 0,
    "rom_size": 401408,
    ...
  },
...

> neotools applets get-settings 0
[
  {
    "label": "Auto Repeat (16385)",
    "ident": 16385,
    "type": "OPTION",
    "value": {
      "selected": "On (4097)",
      "options": [
        "On (4097)",
        "Off (4098)"
      ]
    }
  },
...

Update system applet settings. Set idle time to five minutes.

> neotools --verbose applets set-settings 0 16388 5 4 59

Installation

Confirm that you have Python 3 on your machine. Install neotools from the Python package repository with: pip3 install neotools.

Troubleshooting

Access denied

usb.core.USBError: [Errno 13] Access denied (insufficient permissions)
A simple way to fix it is to run the command with sudo. However, it is better to give granular udev permissions to neotools. Add the following rule to the udev rules, into, for example /lib/udev/rules.d/50-alphasmart.rules.

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="081e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="bd01", MODE="660", GROUP="plugdev"
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="081e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="bd04", MODE="660", GROUP="plugdev"

Make sure that your user is a member of the plugdev group.