I’m working on a script to automate downloading firmware images. At the moment it seems to work for “production” images, but …

  • I don’t have a tablet enrolled in the beta program
  • because the beta program requires that the tablet be connected to the “reMarkable cloud”
  • which I don’t trust, because it’s hosted by google and the files are not encrypted.

So I have a request, primarily for people who (1) have tablets enrolled in the beta program, (2) are not afraid of the command line, and (3) use macOS or Linux (because I don’t know if the process described below can work on windows or not).

This page contains a walk-through of how to manually capture the upgrade request from a tablet, save it to your computer, and then “re-play” that request to the reMarkable servers. reMarkable’s response contains two string fragments which can be joined together to produce the actual URL of the firmware image file.

My request is for somebody to follow the first part of the directions on this page, and capture the request that their tablet sends when it asks reMarkable if any new firmware is available. If you want to follow the rest of the process and also capture reMarkable’s response to that request (i.e. 03-response.txt), and even download a beta firmware file, that’s fine … but for now all I’m looking for is the 01-req.txt file itself.

Note that the 01-req.txt file will contain your tablet’s serial number and machineid value. If you’re not comfortable sharing this information, you can edit the file and replace the values with xxx or something … just be careful not to change anything else. The other UUID values (other than appid) appear to be randomly generated, feel free to obscure them if you like but I’m not aware of any risk to your privacy if you don’t.

At this point I’m trying to figure out how a “request for a beta version” is different from a “request for a normal version”, i.e. if there’s something different about the request, or if reMarkable has a list of specific serials and/or machineid values which are allowed to request beta versions. And if it’s not tied to serials or machineid values, I plan to make the script able to download either the normal or the beta firmware.

ALSO … and again this is only if you’re comfortable sharing, please send me a copy of the /home/root/.config/remarkable/xochitl.conf file from your tablet. Feel free to obscure values like DeveloperPassword, IdleContact, and IdleName, as well as everything under the [wifinetworks] section.

If you are willing to send any files, please send them to …

  • Keybase: jms1 (preferred)
  • Email: kg4zow@mac.com

Thanks in advance.