Photography: Updating Nikon D3300 Firmware

Yesterday I had done some photography for an event and a random thought crossed my mind. "Even a niche device like a DSLR uses firmware, I wonder if there is firmware for this old camera..."

A quick search led me to an official guide on the Nikon page for the D3300 camera, in which they explain the steps.

A short summary follows:

1. Accept the terms and download the software to an empty folder and run the .exe file. This will create a .bin file within a folder called "D3300Update"

 

2. Place the .bin file on a separate, formatted, SD card

 

3. Put the SD card in your Nikon D3300, turn the camera on and press the menu button. Navigate to the firmware settings and start the update. For me the update took around 1-2 minutes. You can then turn the camera off when it tells you to and enter your regular SD card for example.

Tech: Buying used devices

It should come as no surprise that the macro economical situation is getting bad, the economy is a cyclic creature.

When times are tough we have to look over our spending, so I decided to look into the second hand market for electronics. These are the lessons learned.

Buying a computer was a great choice, I got a high quality computer for a decent price. This is true for the docking station as well. 

One of my latest purchases was a smartphone, so far so good, but I'm not completely migrated to it just yet. I had to buy a different case with more slots for credit cards and the like. I also got a HP Elitebook 2540p today and I'm testing it out.

When you buy electronics there are some points you need to consider.

Is the product in good physical shape?

Dents and scratches doesn't affect performance, but cracks on the screen, damaged cables or batteries will definitely lower the quality of the usage experience.

Could it be infected with harmful software? 

At least reset the operative system through a clean reinstall. You don't know what computer skills the previous owner had nor what software has been installed. If you have the opportunity you might even want to format disks and change SSD.

Is the seller trustable?

This goes along with point number two, as well as your physical safety. Make sure to perform the purchase safely and screen the seller a bit so you know who you are dealing with.

So far my second hand computers, tablets and phone has proven to meet the expectations. With a bit of love you can often maintain the devices, just do some research on the device models to see if the manufacturer still releases updates and if there are spare parts.

Motorola One: Rooting model XT1941-4

My latest project was rooting a Motorola One, a phone model released in October 2018. At first I tried Kingoroot but that app did not work.

These are the three steps that you need:

1. Prepping the phone and getting software for the computer

2. Unlocking the bootloader using Fastboot.exe

3. Completing the root and confirming that it worked.

Step 1: Prepping phone and computer

1. You will need a cable from the computer to the phone, which uses USB-C.

2. Download platform-tools_r33.0.3-windows from Android. Extract the files to some easy to access folder on your computer. C:\Temp\ for example. You will be using ADB.exe and Fastboot.exe for this operation. 

3. Download the device's USB drivers to your computer, such as MotorolaDeviceManager_2.5.4.exe

Step 2: Unlocking the bootloader on your smartphone

This erases all your data, voids your guarantee and you have the full responsibility for what happens next. 

To unlock my Motorola One I used the official guide from Motorola themselves. This requires you to create an account on Motorola. The guide leads to a unlocking code that is used to unlocking the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) of the phone. 

At this step you should have Fastboot.exe and your device USB drivers installed.

1. Put your Motorola One in fastboot mode. Turn your phone off. Hold the minus volume button down and start the phone. Then connect your phone to the computer.

2. On your computer: start command prompt as admin (or start PowerShell as admin, then enter CMD). Set your location to the folder where Fastboot.exe is residing.

Enter this command: fastboot oem get_unlock_data and the command prompt should return 4-5 lines of data. Copy and connect all the data together into one long line containing numbers, letters and symbols. Do not include "(bootloader)". This long text string is the device ID.

3. Paste the device ID into the textbox on the Motorola site and you will be emailed an unlock key that is unique to you.

4. Once again, make sure your phone is in fastboot mode, connected to the computer and that your command prompt is targeted at the location of your fastboot.exe. Verify that your device is connected with this command: fastboot devices.

5. Enter the command fastboot oem unlock <unique unlock key>  and you might have to enter it one more time to confirm. Now you are done, restart device and you will be notified that your Motorola One bootloader has been unlocked.

Step 3: Rooting the device

I based this step on a guide for a phone of the same brand, Motorola G9 Power.

First you need stock firmware, it's basically the pure OS from the original manufacturer. It's something you can fall back on when something goes wrong. I had to flash stock firmware to my recovery for my Google Nexus 7 2012 wi-fi today when I was rooting that tablet for example, after having installed a custom kernel that wouldn't go away.

1. The stock firmware I used for my Motorola One was downloaded from this page, after figuring out which software channel (reteu), model (XT1941-4) and build (QPKS30.54-22-13-15) to use. Getting this wrong can cause nasty side effects. 

2. In your Magisk phone app it should say that you have Ramdisk. After downloading the .zip, unzip the folder and copy boot.img to your phone's storage. My phone didn't have a separate vbmeta partition. Here I followed this guide.

3. Open Magisk app, press install and navigate to "select and patch a file". Target your boot.img-file and start. This creates a patched image file. Bring this to your computer using your command prompt with the following commands:

adb pull /storage/path/to/magisk_patched_[random_strings].img

Reboot your phone into fastboot mode and flash the image that you pulled using this command:

fastboot flash boot /path/to/magisk_patched.img

Once completed, do a reboot and you should be done.

Summary: A few last words on the rooting experience

You can now download Root Checker to see if you can grant super user access. Not all apps can ask for this permission. I'm currently experiencing issues managing super user access from the Magisk app, but it does show apps that have been granted access. You don't seem to be able to "add" permission manually.