Leapster Explorer: USB Boot

This how-to will explain a bit about the USB booting process of the Leapfrog Explorer and provide a Linux shell script to download the file to the device.

Programs Needed

Terminal app to check progress

Software Needed

File:Pager.v0.1.tgz shell script

Hardware

DJHI or other means of gaining a UART Console (optional)

On Explorer

To turn on USB Boot mode, with the USB connected hold down the Right and Left Shoulder buttons along with the ? mark button, while holding them down, turn the power on, you should end up seeing a screen showing the LX connected to a PC.

Under Linux

Download the Pager script and save it in a directory, make sure it is set to execute file permissions for your user. From a terminal run

 $ sudo ./pager.sh <filename>

Where file name is the name of the firmware you want to download to the Explorer. In your terminal window you ran the script in, you should see something like this.

 1: Writing bytes:0 -> 16383 to /dev/sdc
 SCSI Status: Good 
 2: Writing bytes:16384 -> 32767 to /dev/sdc
 SCSI Status: Good 
 ...
 ...
 430: Writing bytes:7045120 -> 7061503 to /dev/sdc
 SCSI Status: Good 
 431: Writing bytes:7061504 -> 7077887 to /dev/sdc
 Verifying /dev/sdc

and it will be done. You can check in your UART terminal, and you should see it uncompressing Linux.