Thread: How To Connect A USB Drive To The BlackBerry PlayBook

Ever since the PlayBook has been rooted there have been numerous hacks that have been made available. This one comes to us from the creative mind of Guillem Mateos, @guillemmateos over at the elTecnoBlog. This how-to will allow you to connect a USB device to your BlackBerry PlayBook. So if your running out of storage on that 16 GB PlayBook or want to store that big movie collection on an external device this guide is for you.

Now before we get started there are a few things we need to go over. First this how-to is a little more advanced and does require a little bit of technical skill. Second, it requires that your PlayBook be rooted. So please proceed with caution.

Warning: BBOS is not responsible for you damaging your device. These instructions are meant as a base guideline and results may very depending on Operating system environments. Please proceed with caution. Entering commands incorrectly may cause your device to be permanently damaged.

These instructions were adapted from Guillem Mateos guide that can be found here. I have only made slight modifications.

note: only tested on PlayBook OS 1.8.xxx, OS 2.0 has not been tested.

Instructions By Guillem Mateo

Things you will need:

- Root access to your PlayBook

- Female USB A to micro USB cable and a soldering iron Or USB OTG cable

- A pendrive (USB Drive)

First step – The USB OTG Cable

Get a USB OTG cable or just find a Female USB A to micro USB cable, open the micro USB side and solder pins 4 and 5 of the micro USB port together (this is what turns the USB port into host mode). The photo shows the first version i used. Then i decided to get a nice USB OTG angle cable as you can see in the first photo of the post. If you are interested in one of those, just let me know.

Second step – Console commands

When you have your USB OTG cable, you can proceed to run the commands to load the necessary kernel drivers. The nice part is that everything is already on the PlayBook, so you don’t really need to upload anything. The commands you will need to run are the following:

Code:

slay RIM_usbmgr-Winchester
slay io-usb
slay devb-umass
sleep 2
RIM_usbmgr-Winchester -m0s
io-usb -domap4430-mg ioport=0x4a0ab000,irq=124
sleep 2
waitfor /dev/io-usb/io-usb 4
devb-umass cam pnp blk automount=+hd6t6:/accounts/1000/shared/usb:dos,automount=+hd6:/accounts/1000/shared/usb:dos

The only line you really need to pay attention to, is the last one. It shows where the pendrive will be automatically mounted after you connect it. You can specify different mount points for different partitions just separating them by comas (in my example command, hd6t6 and hd6 shown)

The other commands just kill the USB server running and start it with the required commands to be able to run the USB port as a host port. There is also a command to load the kernel driver (io-usb domap….).

Last step – Connect your pendrive (USB Drive)

If all went well, you should now be able to connect your pendrive and access contents on the mount folder you selected. Please keep also in mind that you must first create this directory for the automount to work. I also noticed that sometimes the kernel modules does produce a bus error and crashes. If that happens, just try to run all the commands again.

That's it you should now be able to connect your USB drive to your PlayBook. Big thanks to Guillem Mateos the finder of this hack and creator of this how-to.

source

This is awesome. I doubt I'll ever do it because I don't want to root my PlayBook but this is friggin sweet for anyone that does...

Originally Posted by AgentBlackBerry

This is awesome. I doubt I'll ever do it because I don't want to root my PlayBook but this is friggin sweet for anyone that does...

I completely agree, I couldn't have said it better.

I knew this day would come, for the BlackBerry PlayBook, with a bit of risk and skill... just imagine connecting a 160, 250, 500, or even 750GB external hard drive to the PlayBook, and watch (HD) videos, and/or listen to a ton of music.

Only if RIM could come out with an OEM USB converter accessory for the PlayBook, I guarantee that accessory would sell very well.

High 5 to ice 2921 for posting this thread, excellent!

I agree

I also agree with you. I would never root my Playbook either. I hope it happens and I already have my USB O-T-G cable ready.