Been a while since my last post. I went on vacation right after my car got rear-ended. Now that I got it back, I wanted to share a few tweaks that I’ve made to make my life easier, starting with the day/night mode toggle using Tasker. It’s quite simple, actually. It can pretty much be described with a series of screenshots. First, create a new Task, and call it something descriptive. In the task, add an item from “Tasker” called “If”, and select “Night Mode”, then set it to match “on”. After adding this, add two more tasks underneath like so:

Nest, add a similar “Else” statement. This will ensure that if the Night Mode is “on” then it will switch to Day Mode, and otherwise it’ll switch back to Night Mode. In Tasker, this is called “Flow Control”:

Lastly, test by pressing the “play” button on the top left corner of the screen. You should be able to toggle between day and night modes easily:

If you want to place this as an icon on your home screen (or assign it to a quick launch shortcut if you use steering wheel controls), you will need to click the bottom right icon and select an icon for this task. Once done, go to your launcher and add a Tasker “Task Cut” shortcut. You can then customize how it looks and you’ll be able to click it to switch modes. Mine is assigned to a steering wheel […]

Good news, everyone! You can root your Parrot Asteroid Smart head unit. The entry that’s going to follow this one will describe how to install the Google Play store and spoof your device identity so you can download all of the apps available to most Android devices out there. But this post is just about rooting. Rooting is, arguably, the easy part. That’s because someone has already figured out a generic root tool for a whole number of devices, which includes the Smart. I take no credit for this work.

Rooting

Rooting is the easy part of this process. The first thing you will need is to download a tool called Framaroot from here.

Once downloaded, you need to install the Framaroot APK on your device. I used the ADB utility:

./adb install /Users/Yuri\ A/Downloads/APK/Framaroot.apk

Once installed, run the utility and install SuperSU (you’ll have to select it from the drop down menu). It’s *IMPORTANT* that you use SuperSU and not something else:

Reboot the device. Check that you have the SuperSU application now on your device:

You’ll want to run it and ensure that root access is enabled:

Run the following command in on your computer:

./adb shell
su

You should see the “$” change to “#” in the shell, and on your device you should see a confirmation popup asking to grant superuser access to ADB:

That’s it, you have successfully rooted your Parrot Asteroid Smart! Easiest root ever. Thanks to the creator of Framaroot, of course! Stay […]