Last night a terrible thing happened, I dropped my Razr Maxx and shattered the screen. In its defense, I have dropped it on many occasions, including (accidentaly) throwing it across a concrete garage (face down), and kicking it into a wall (from bed). Without even a scratch on the screen, it has withstood my abuse like a champ, but last night it just couldn’t handle the sharp jagged rocks that broke the screen.
Sometimes people get lucky, and even though the screen is shattered, its still usable, (albeit, touch sensitivity probably sucks after that). If that was my case… I wouldn’t have anything to write about. No… my screen no longer turned on. So now what?
Remote control it! It is an android after all (pun intended).
Heres what we need:
- Android SDK
- androidscreencast (https://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/)
- USB cable
First thing I did was start up the Android Screencast java program. This little program detected my plugged in phone and immediately brought up my screen. Apparently if you have a rooted device, you can also send clicks from the program. Unfortunately, my device was not rooted.
In order to send commands to your phone, you are gonna need to use the Android SDK. Once you have it installed, find the platform-tools folder, cd into it, and run:
./adb shell
That should bring you into a shell command to which you can send commands to your phone.
usage: input ...
input text
input keyevent
input tap
input swipe
My first challenge was getting past my lock screen. I have a PIN number, which I was easily able to enter using the command:
input text 1234
Then, came the more challenging part: hitting the submit button. In order to submit my PIN, I had to guess/determine the X Y coordinates of the enter button, and send a tap via:
input tap 350 750
Remember that the Android coordinates screen starts at the top left. So, (0,0) is the top left, (MaxX, 0) is the top right, (0, MaxY) is the bottom left, and (MaxX, MaxY) is the bottom right.
In order to get the Notification Window, I had to swipe down:
input swipe 350 0 350 700
Another neat trick is sending KEYCODES via the
input keyevent
command. You can find a list of KEYCODES here. I particularly found
input keyevent 3
useful, which is the Home button.
Luckily, I was able to navigate through Android, launch my SMS Backup program, and backup everything I needed, eventually transfering them all to my computer.
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