Getting the device
Yesterday when I was at my local flea market looking for fun stuff to mess with, this thing caught my eye. It seems to be a Takeaway/Just Eat/Grub Hub/Lieferando payment terminal. More specifically, T-Connect Terminal V2.
This was definitely not the first time I've seen one of those, both here and in restaurants, but I remember recently seeing a blog post by Marcel on it, so I decided to get it.
The device has a 7" screen on the front and 2x USB ports, Ethernet port, antenna screw and a DC jack on the back.
Once I got home, I first tried to power it with a 5v TP-Link power adapter. When I plugged it in, the device showed the Takeaway logo, but the backlight started glitching and it shut off.
I suspected this was a power issue, and I was right. Unfortunately, that 5v power adapter was the only one I had that fits. I did not know how many volts the thing needs, it wasn't written on the label and I could not find that info with a simple Google search, so I asked ChatGPT. It told me it needs 12v, so as my only source I decided to trust that.
I cut the cable of another 12v power adapter I had for an STB and connected those together, resulting in a janky 12v power adapter that fits in the device. To my amazement, it somehow worked.
Hacking the device
Disclaimer: I am dumb. I did not discover most of my stuff myself.
The device booted into some app and seemed to be registered to some doner place. Not wanting to mess with the previous owner's stuff and potentially get in trouble, I decided to reset it. I couldn't find a clear way to reset it, so I decided to do some googling. I found a discussion at XDA about it, people found that pressing the bottom left corner 5 times asks for a pin code. 59074 opens an app launcher and 14611 opens a diagnostic menu. Another way to get into another app is via an NFC tag, but this way is easier.
From there I opened settings and did a hard reset. After a few minutes, I was greeted by a welcome screen asking me to activate my device.
I couldn't do anything from there other than open the Wi-Fi selector, so I decided to use the same menu again. I then tried to do what Marcel did on his device and used a USB to install a few apps, including a new launcher. The Cyanogen file browser could not see the external storage, and I could not open the USB drive through the notifications panel because mine didn't work for some reason. I thought I was stuck, but it turned out I could browse the drive from the settings app and copy the APKs to the internal storage, then use the Cyanogen file browser to install them.
I then installed some APKs, more specifically AIDA64, Firefox, Niagara launcher, Power Menu (since there are no physical buttons), RD Client, Minecraft PE and Xash3D.
I set the default launcher to Niagara and uninstalled the terminal client app. Now it's basically just a cut-down android tablet.
Misusing the device
AIDA64 reported the device having a Snapdragon 210, 1GB RAM and 4GB of usable space. It runs Android 6. My next goal was to get Minecraft and Half-Life running.
Minecraft was easy. I just copied over an old APK from archive.org, and installed it. It worked great, ran at about 40 FPS and I was able to control it with my USB keyboard and mouse.
(the screen recorder puts additional load on the poor thing, the game performs worse than usual in the recording)
For Half-Life, I decided to use Xash3D. Even though that version is deprecated, I still decided to use it. I installed Half-Life on my laptop, then copied the valve folder from the installation directory onto my USB stick as well as the Xash3D APK File.
I then made a folder called .halflife in the internal storage and copied the valve folder from the USB stick there. After opening Xash3D, I pressed start without touching a single setting. To my surprise, it worked flawlessly, and even ran at above 60 FPS most of the times.
(the screen recorder puts additional load on the poor thing, the game performs worse than usual in the recording)
Thank you for reading this to the end. This is my first ever blog post, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me.