Rockbox on HiBy OS

[Tartarus6]

Existing Port

Rockbox has a working port for the HiBy R1 and HiBy R3ProII. Here's the page where that is.

I would like to improve the HiBy OS ports by adding some of the missing functionality:

• Bluetooth
• Wifi
• USB-DAC Mode

This page talks about why rockbox does not currently support bluetooth, and how it could be added.

How We Might be Able to Add This Functionality

Since the HiBy port is "hosted" (meaning it runs on top of the linux OS), we should theoretically be able to simply use the drivers already in the original firmware to add the functionality to rockbox.

Also, apparently rockbox does support bluetooth on at least one device. Since that device runs Android, they just used the system bluetooth stuff, so it was easy to add. That means that rockbox can have the buttons and such for bluetooth. So we might just be able to add in those already created buttons to the hiby port, and link up the hiby drivers... maybe.

Other Gripes

Another issue I've had in my short time testing RockBox on hiby os: It's kind of counterintuitive and ugly.
It just doesn't feel very responsive, and navigating the menus is confusing. I'm guessing that rockbox was built for platforms that aren't touchscreen, so the UI feels really weird on hiby os.

Not sure how to fix this, it kind of just pushes me to want to improve the experience with hiby_player if possible, but decompiling that fully doesn't really feel achievable in any reasonable amount of time.

But also I'm new to using rockbox, so maybe there's something I'm missing or some major improvements that could be made with relative ease.

So...

If anyone has any ideas/opinions on how to integrate or improve rockbox on hiby os, please share. In the meantime ill keep looking at the rockbox source. I'm trying to build rockbox for hiby os from source, I should have that figured out in the next couple days so i can try messing with it.

[noisetta]

This is a really exciting direction.

On the Bluetooth/WiFi/USB-DAC front — since we have full firmware access and understand the init system, we know exactly which binaries and drivers handle each of these on the HiBy side:

Bluetooth: BlueALSA stack (bluealsa, bluetoothctl, brcm_patchram_plus)
WiFi: Broadcom driver initialized via S43wifi_bcm_init_config in init.d
USB-DAC: uac_device_config.sh and the USB gadget configuration in /sys/kernel/config/usb_gadget/

The Android Bluetooth parallel is encouraging — if the Android port was able to hook into system Bluetooth APIs, the HiBy Linux port should be able to do the same with BlueALSA. The integration code would be different but the approach is the same.

On the UI/UX issues — I think you're right that RockBox was built primarily for non-touchscreen devices and it shows. @Jepl4r is already working on GUI modifications to hiby_player's layout files which might actually be the more practical path to a good user experience — improving what we already have rather than trying to make RockBox feel native on a touchscreen DAP.

That said, having RockBox as an alternative with proper hardware support would still be valuable for users who prefer it. The two efforts aren't mutually exclusive.