How Do the Samsung FlipSuit Cards Work?

I’ve been looking at the Samsung FlipSuit cards lately. For the uninitiated, these are cards that one slips into a case that cause the phone to also change the content of its inner and outer screens to match the theme on the card. You can find these for the Galaxy Flip 4/5, and more recently the Galaxy S24. A question I’ve seen asked in reading about these is “How do they work” and “Can I make my own.” While I don’t have sufficient technical data needed to enable you to go off and make your own, I do have some knowledge of how these work. These are not the first iteration of such a system. The earliest form of those date back to 2018.

Galaxy Friends: An Ancestor of FlipSuit

At the Samsung Developer’s Conference from 2018, one of the technologies and solutions on display was Samsung Theme Studio. With Theme Studio, a creative could package changes to the UI to give the phone an entirely new look and feel. These themes are packaged in an APK (like other Android applications) and available for download in the Samsung App Store. This tool is relevant to another offering released that same year.

At the same conference, Samsung showcased the Galaxy Friends Accessory program. Under this program, someone could make an NFC enabled and associate that case with a Theme and other content. The theme would automatically be applied just by putting the case on a phone. In addition to the theme, content and applications could be associated with the case. Someone could get exclusive access to content (that could be changed as frequently as once a day) through having this case. It’s not hard to draw a line between this and the Galaxy FlipSuit cards.

Where can you find the Galaxy Friends program now? I don’t think that you can. The email address associated with it no longer exists. Outside of a few forum posts, there is no mention of it on Samsung’s site at all. The strongest remaining items of evidence that it existed are in the forms of a couple of Amazon listings for Galaxy Friends cases for the Note 10 (Ironman Case, Spiderman Case). Reviews for it make mention of the NFC Chip and the theme that gets applied to the phone.

Does that mean Galaxy Friends is dead and gone? Well, no. Searching for that name yields few results, but searching for the functionality is a different matter.

Knox Configure

Over the years, Samsung has moved its products and services related to device management, configuration, and security under the Knox branding. While you can find some mention of Knox across a broad range of products (don’t be surprised if you find a Wi-Fi enabled clothing washer with Knox) we are most interested in the services on mobile devices. I’ve found that some are confused on what Knox is because of the broad list of products on which it can be found. The specific Knox service in which we have interest is Knox Configure.

Knox Configure provides functionality for enrolling and configuring a device even before it has been removed from its box. A device’s unique ID could be added to someone’s Samsung Knox account (usually through a Samsung reseller). A device could also be enrolled during setup, or enrolled by an accessory. For accessory enrolment, the accessory could be an NFC device, a cover, or a USB device. You might think that NFC devices and covers are identical, but more on that in a moment.

Once enrolled, a device will apply a profile. The profile could contain a variety of settings and applications to be applied to the device. There are two profile attributes of special interest here, the theme and the accessory ID. The theme, according to Samsung’s documentation, would be created by Theme Studio. There’s a bit of a break-down in process and/or documentation here. While Knox Configure points to the Theme Studio page, telling a developer they should get access to it, Theme Studio access is restricted. Years ago, anyone could get access to it. Present day, someone wishing to have access can apply during windows that open every other year (the next window is said to be in 2025). I get the impression that the Knox Configure group in Samsung and the Theme Studio groups are not completely in sync with each other. For those reading this with the hopes of making your own themes, here if your first obstacle.

The accessory ID attributes are meant to be written to the USB, NFC, or cover device. According to Samsung’s current documentation, this is something that should be done by a Samsung Accessory Partner.

These profiles are housed on Samsung’s servers and associated with a licenses that the person making the profile hat to purchase. That these profiles are tied to callbacks to a Samsung services implies that one wouldn’t be able to arbitrarily make their own card without Samsung’s involvement.

There may be other services that Samsung has for distribution of content based on an NFC cards of which I don’t know. Note that Knox is just one of them.

NFC Device Enrollment

How does the NFC device invoke enrollment? One of the messages encoded on an NFC card will be a URL. This URL starts with smdm://accessory (Samsung Mobile Device Management?). This URL will have additionally parameters attached to it. But this URI prefix is important. There is a package that is registered to handle URLs that start with this prefixed. The common name for the package is “Knox Enrollment.” The package identifier is com.sec.enterprise.knox.cloudmdm.smdms. I’ve found that if I use this URL without specifying any parameters that this process will crash and I see output on logcat. I’ve been able to figure out some of the other parameter names, but I have no idea what their potential values would be. Here are some of the other potential parameters passed.

countryiso_code
deviceProductType
email
mdm_token
program
seg_url
service_type
update_url
mdm_token

I speculate that if any information is to be found on potential values for these, that the information will be found in the Knox SDK Documentation. These values get passed to the Knox Enrollment service through this service. Once the device is enrolled, the associated configuration items are applied, including and themes or applications associated with the profile. However, I don’t think that information on all of the values will be found through documentation that is generally avaialble. Samsung explicitly states in one of their documents that only accessory manufacturers can inject the IDs into the accessories.

Image from Samsung documentation stating that only manufacturers can inject identifiers into accessories.

Examining a FlipSuit Card

Though I’ve seen the FlipSuit cards described as NFC cards, I’m not entirely convince of this. When I hold one of these cards to an NFC reading device I get nothing. It is possible that it uses some features of NFC unfamiliar to me. I don’t have either a Flip 5 or Galaxy S24 (the most recent phone that I have my hands on is an S23). Earlier, I mentioned that Knox Config has NFC and covers listed as separate device types. I think this is why, there is something different in the communication from an NFC card and the Flip cards. I held a FlipSuit card to the back of a Galaxy Flip 5 while an NFC examination application was running. I got no info.

What Happens when a Knox Configure License Expires

Knox Configure and cases with themes have been around long enough such that we know what happens when a theme expires. Consider the Galaxy S20 and it’s LED case. The LED case had a theme that was associated with it. That theme expired on or around January 1, 2023. Some users in a reddit thread discussed their experience.Of note, before the theme reached it’s expiration date, there was a notification for it. Note that this notification refers to “Samsung Galaxy Friends.” It’s not clear to me if the theme was expiring because the Galaxy Friends program was being sunset or because the license associated with the theme was at the end of it’s life.

Screen with notification about expiring theme.

When the date was reached, the theme automatically uninstalled.

The Pathway To Making Theme Cards

I’ve mentioned obstacles and information and obstacles. If you still wanted to go through with making a theme card, what would you do? You need to get access to Theme Studio. While the next window for applying for Theme Studio isn’t until 2025, this might not be as much as a problem as some might initially think. Between now and when the window opens, you can start practing designing your themes and get a portfolio put together for the application process. After you have access to Theme Studio and are able to publish themes, you might want to become familiar with Knox Configure. You can get a 90-day subscription to Knox Configure at no cost. You won’t need to get a deep understanding of it though. For making the cards themselves though, you will need to go through a Samsung Accessory Partner. There’s no way around that of which I know, since the information I have on how data is written to the card is incomplete.

Though not in furtherance of making Theme Cards, in one of my next posts, I will be exploring a simple Knox Configuration scenario to customize a Samsung device. I’ll also be posting the code that I used for examining NFC cards. The code was written completely in HTML and JavaScript.

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Samsung Developer Conference 2022

Wednesday, Samsung held its 2022 developer conference. A standout attribute of this conference is they invited people to attend in person; something I’ve not really seen in developer conferences since 2019 (for obvious reasons🦠). Ofcourse, for those that cannot attend, many aspects of the conference were also streamed from https://samsungdeveloperconference.com and from their YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/SamsungDevelopers ).

Concerning the content, the conference felt a bit heavier on items of consumer interest. The keynote highlighted Know Matrix, Samsung’s block-chain based solution for security among their devices (not just phones), Samsung TV Plus, Gaming, Tizen, and more.

The sessions for the conference were available either as prerecorded presentations, or live sessions. The prerecorded sessions were made available all at once .

Android

In addition to making updates to their interface (One UI, coming to the S2022 series at the end of the month) Samsung is adding a Task Bar to the Tab S8 and their foldable phones. Samsung also covered support for multitasking; Samsung’s phones support running 2 or 3 applications simultaneously. Many of the multitasking features use standard Android APIs. Samsung has also made available a task bar on their larger screen devices (tablets, foldable phones) to enable switching applications without going to the home screen or task switcher. There ar multiple levels of support that an application could have for multi-window capable devices. One is simply supporting the window being resized. FLAG_ACTIVITY_LAUNCH_ADJACENT indicates that an application was designed for a multi-window environment. New interactions enabled by multi-window applications includes drag-and-drop from one instance to another, multiple instances of an application, and supporting “flex mode” (where either side of a foldable device is used for different purposes).

Some well-known applications already support features for these environments, including Gmail, Facebook, Microsoft Outlook, and Tik-Tok.

Presentations

Multitasking Experiences
LE Wireless Audio

Tizen

It’s been 10 years since Tizen was released in 2012. In previous years, has presented Tizen as its operating system for a wide range of devices. The OS could be found running on some cameras, phones, TVs, and wearables. The Tizen OS got a great footing in TVs; you’ll find it on all of the Samsung TVs available now above a certain size, some computer monitors, and a few TVs from other manufacturers. Its presence on other devices has also diminished, with Samsung’s wearables now using Android Wear and the Tizen phones being out of production. I encountered some of the “Tizen Everywhere” marketing, but it now appears to refer to the wide range of displays that use Tizen.

One of Samsung’s presentations concerning Tizen had its own timeline of Tizen’s evolution. I might make my own, since I’ve been interested since it was in its proto-version (Bada). Samsung announced Tizen 7.0. The features highlighted in the release were in the areas of

OpenXR runtime
Real-time Kernel
3D Rendering enhancements
Android HAL support
Cross-platform improcement
Natural User Interface Enhancements

I personally found the natural user interface enhancements to be interesting. It included a lot of AI driven features. Support for running Tizen applications on Android was also mentioned. I’m curious as to what this means though. If typical Samsung Android devices can run Tizen, then it gives the OS new relevance and increases the strength of the “Tizen Everywhere” label. Tizen has been updated to use more recent Chromium release for its Web engine. Tizen also has support for Flutter. Support was actually released last year. But compatibility and performance are increased with Tizen 7.0.

Samsung has also exposed more Native SDKs in Tizen 7.0 to C# and C from other SDKs. For .Net developers, Tizen 7.0 has increased MAUI support.

Presentations

What’s new in Tizen
Tizen Everywhere

Samsung TV Plus

This is Samsung’s IPTV service. It is integrated into the TV in such a way that it is indistinguishable from OTA channels. Entities interested in the services that this has to offer are most likely Advertisers. Samsung provided information on both making available one’s video content on Samsung TV and how to monetize it. While I don’t see myself as one that would be implementing features related to this, I did find the presentation interesting. Before a show airs (about 5 minutes before) the ad slots are available to advertisers to fill. The ad inventory is auctioned off.

Presentations

Samsung TV Plus
Home Connectivity Alliance

Gaming

The TVs support being paired with a Bluetooth controller and streaming games through the Samsung Gaming Hub. HTML-based games are served to the phone via what Samsung calls Instant Play. Samsung also showed off the features it’s made available for emersive audio within gaming environments.

Presentations

Dolby Atmos with Games
Immersive Experiences on Big Screens

Health

Samsung says they worked with Google to come up with a single set of APIs that developers can use for health apps. Often times, Samsung begins developing for some set of hardware features and later Samsung and Google normalize the way of interacting with those features. I thought these sessions would be all about Samsung Health (the application that lets you log your health stats on the phones). But the development also included their large screen (TV) interfaces with enhancements for tele-health visits. Collection of health related data has been enhanced on the Galaxy Watch 5.One of the enhancements is a microcontroller dedicated to collecting health data while the CPU sleeps. This allows the watch to collect information with less demands on the battery. The new watch is also able to measure body composition through electrical signals.

Presentations

TeleHealth in Samsung Devices
Expand Health Experiences with Galaxy Watch

IoT

Samsung’s SmartThings network now also includes the ability to find other devices and even communicate data to those devices. Like other finding networks, their solution is based on devices being able to communicate with each other. Devices can send two bytes of data through the network. How this two bytes is used it up to the device. 2 bytes isn’t a lot. But it still could be of utility, such as a device sending a desired temperature to a thermostat, or another device simply signaling “I’m home.”

Presentations

SmartThings FindMy
Home Connectivity Alliance

Other Sessions

There were plenty of other topic areas covered. I’ve only highlighted a few areas. If you would like to see the presentations for yourself visit the YouTube Channel or see the Samsung Developer’s Conference page.

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Conferences and a Hearings, Sept-Oct 2021

During the month of October, there are a couple of developer conferences happening. Samsung is resuming what had been their regular Developers conference (there wasn’t one in 2020, for obvious reasons). Like so many other conferences, this one is going to be online on 26 October. Details of what will be in it haven’t been shared yet, but I noticed a few things from the iconography of their promotional video.

he Tizen logo is present, specifically on a representation of a TV. It looks that Samsung has abandoned the Tizen OS for anything else. They generally don’t make an announcement that they are sunsetting a technology and instead opt to quietly let it disappear. A few months ago Google made the ambiguous announcement that Samsung and Google were combining their wearable operating systems into a single platform while not directly saying that Tizen was going away. Just before the release of the Gear 4 watch (which runs Android Wear, not Tizen) Samsung made an announcement that they were still supporting Tizen. But with no new products on the horizon and the reduction in support in the store, this looks more like a phased product sunset.

Some of the other products suggested by the imagery include wearables, Smart Things (home automation), Bixby (voice assistant) and Samsung Health.

October 12-14, Google is hosting their Cloud Next conference. Registration for this conference is open now, and available at no cost. Google has made the session catalog available. The session categories include AI/Machine Learning, Application Development, Security, and more.

Sessions available at https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next

And last, if you have an interest in the USA’s developing responses to technology issues, this Thursday the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is holding a hearing with Facebook’s head of safety over some recent reports published by the Wall Street Journal about the impact of it’s apps on younger audiences. The hearing (with live stream) will be Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 10:30am EDT. The livestream will be available at www.commerce.senate.gov.

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Samsung provides some Clarity in the Google Wearable Collaboration

At the last Google IO Conference, Google made a rather ambiguous announcement about their partnership with Samsung and watches. Samsung currently sells their Gear watches running an operating system that they made in collaboration with a few other companies. In the announcement, Google said that they were combining their Wear OS operating system with Samsung’s Tizen operating system. What exactly does this mean? There was not clarification given during the conference. Looking at the conference sessions, there were two sessions on development for Google’s Android OS.

Generally speaking, one can’t just combine two operating systems. They could build a different operating system that has support for the applications from another OS or take designs from the UI of an OS and apply it to another. But there isn’t anything meaningful in the phrase “Combine operating system.” Jumping over to the Samsung Developer forums, I found there were people with similar questions, all of which were met with the reply “We can’t give you more information at this time.”

Information was finally made available earlier this week. In summary, Samsung is going to adopt Wear OS (Android) for their watches. They said that they will support the existing Tizen based watches for another three years. That announcement was surprisingly more direct than I’ve seen Samsung be with other products that they sunset. What I’ve usually seen is that new versions of a product stop coming without any announcement being made (Their Tizen based Z phones, the Gear 360, and Gear VR headsets are all examples of products for which this happened).

If you would like to see the announcement yourself, you can view it in the YouTube video below. The part of interest can be found at time marker 11:25 and continues to the announcement of 3 years of Tizen support at time marker 16:38. What exactly is meant by “support” could still get more clarification. I expect this to at least mean that developers will be able to submit and update applications for the next few years, but Samsung will be giving significantly less resources to Tizen wearable.

This leaves Samsung’s TVs as their last category of hardware that uses the Tizen operating system.

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Creating Development Certificates for Samsung Tizen TVs

Whether you are developing for a consumer Samsung TV or for one of the commercial SSSP displays you’ll need to have a development certificate for your code to run. There is a difference in how the certificate is created for the commercial and consumer displays. But the process is similar off the same for both.

To get started you’ll need to already have Tizen Studio installed. Open the Tizen Studio package manager and make sure that you have the following components installed.

Samsung Certificate Extensions

If you don’t already have the component installed select it for installation. You’ll also need to have the SDK component installed for the version of Tizen that you are targeting (ex: “5.0 TV”). Once the component is present start the Tizen Studio Device Manager.

The device manager will be used to get the device’s ID (DUID) for consumer TVs and for installing the development certificate onto the display. For these steps to work the TV must have development mode enabled and must be set to accept development requests from the same IP address as your development machine; it will refuse request from other addresses. If you haven’t already enabled development mode I have another posts on how to do that
here
.

In the device manager there is an icon in the upper right corner of a phone connected a computer. Select this icon. It is for establishing connections to the device manager. In the window that opens you will see a list of devices that you’ve previously connect to. If the IP address of your display is there you can click on the icon of the on/off switch to reconnect to it. If the IP address of your display is not present click on the + icon to add it. When adding you can give the TV a descriptive name, enter the IP address, and the port on which to connect (usually 26101). Click on OK to return to the main Device Manager user interface and you should see your display connected. Right-click on the display and select DUID to see the ID of the display. Go ahead and copy it to the clipboard. You will need it in later on. If you have multiple displays for which you will develop repeat the same steps to collect the DUID values for the other displays and save them to a text document. Note that if you have both consumer and commercial displays that the DUIDs for them cannot be used mixed with each other. You can perform the following steps for all of your consumer displays at once and then all of your commercial displays at once.

Open the Certificate Manager. When it is opened for the first time you may be asked to select a location from which you want to import certificate profiles. Select Cancel here. You will need to create both an Author certificate and a Distributor certificate. Click on the + icon in the upper right corner to start the process of creating a new certificate. What you select on the window that appears is dependent on the type of display for which you are developing.

TizenCertificateTypeSelection

Commercial (SSSP) Display Steps

For the commercial displays select “Tizen. ” In the next step you’ll be asked to enter a name for the certificate profile. If you develop for other device types (such as the mobile device, watch, or the consumer displays) you’ll need to have more than one certificate profile. It will be good for them to have easily identifiable names. Enter a name here that let’s you know that this is a certificate for developing for a commercial display and select Next.

TizenEnteringCertificateProfileName

Next you must select an author certificate. If you’ve created an author certificate before you have the option to select it. If not then select the option to create a new one. I’ll assume that an author certificate has not been created yet. The minimal amount of information that you need for an author certificate is a name, a password for the certificate (don’t forget this password!). You can optionally enter your country code, State, City, Organization, department, and an e-mail address and a filename in which the key file for the certificate will be saved. Enter your options and select “Next”

TizenEnteringCertificateAuthorData

The last selection to make is whether you want to use the default Tizen distributer certificate . While this selection will allow you to submit mobile applications to the Tizen store it is fine for our purposes. Select it and click on “Finish.” With this you have a

TizenDistributerCertificateType

Consumer Display Steps

For the consumer displays when asked for the certificate type select “Samsung”.

TizenCertificateTypeSelection

On the next screen you’ll be asked for the device type. Select “TV.”

TizenDCertificateeviceType

Enter a name for the profile and select next.

TizenCertificateProfileName

Next you’ll select an author certificate. If you already have an author certificate that you’d like to use you can select it here. If you would like to create a new certificate (which you would do if you’ve never created one before) select the first option. You would also select this option if you had a certificate but it has expired. If you had a certificate that has expired you may want to select the option to create a new certificate and check the box that says “Use an Existing Certificate.” If you have an application that has been published to the Tizen store before and are creating a new certificate then you’ll want to use this option since an application’s ID is in part based on the certificate with which it was signed.

TizenAuthorCertificateInformation

Enter the your author information. Remember what your password is, especially if you plan to publish your application under this certificate. When you click on “Next” you’ll be asked to sign into your Samsung account. After signing in your Author certificate is created.

You’ll be presented with the option of backing up your certificate. While this isn’t required it is strongly encouraged. You will want to keep this secure as it forms part of the identity for your apps. But you are almost done. You need a distributor certificate

TizenBackupCertificate

On the next screen you are prompted to either create a new distributor certificate or select an existing one. Choose the option to create a new one.

TizenNewDistributorCert

Now it is time to use the DUID that you copied earlier. If it is already on your clipboard it will automatically be pasted into one of the entries for DUID. You also have the option to change the privilege level, but not really. The two privileges available are “Public” and “Partner.” Partner gives you application to functionality that isn’t available to everyone. But to use Partner level privileges they have to be granted to you by Samsung.

TizenEnterDUID

After you click on “Next” you’ll be greeted with a confirmation that the certificate has been created along with the path to the certificate being shown.

TizenCertificateCreationComplete

For Both Consumer and Commercial

Now that your certificates have been created you need to let the display know about it so that it can recognize applications that were signed with your certificate and allow them to run. To do this return to the device manager. Right-click on the your display in the device manager and select “Permit to install apps.” The display is ready to accept applications now.

Switching Certificate Profiles

If you are developing for more than one type of Tizen device you’ll probably have to change which certificate profile that you are using as you change which platform you are working on. When you need to change profile open the certificate manager. You will see a list of the profiles that you’ve set up and a check-mark next to one marking it as the active profile. If you want to change which profile is active select it from the list and click on the check mark in the upper right corner.

With the certificate created and selected you can now move forward with deploying an application to the display. Start off with a hello world program just to see that it works.

Tizen Compatible TV

Changing the Default Tizen 5.0 Project for Samsung TVs

Tizen-Pinwheel-On-Light-RGB

When using Tizen Studio if you start a project from one of the templates for a TV you may find that the project won’t deploy to a Samsung Consumer TV. There are a couple of changes that can be made to take care of this.

One is to edit the config.xml. There are a couple of lines in it to be changed. There is an element named tizen:profile with a name attribute of “tv”. Change this to “tv-samsung”. The other is in a file that isn’t listed by the IDE named “.tproject”. Under the Platform element is a text value of “tv-5.0”. Change this to “tv-samsung-5.0”. I’ve found that even on a TV running Tizen 4.0 that these changes are sufficient to work. Just don’t use any Tizen 5.0 features on a display that is running an older OS.

Using WITS for Samsung/Tizen TV Development

One of the development scenarios that makes me cringe is an environment in which the steps and time from changing a line of code to seeing its effect is high. This usually happens in an environment with specialized hardware, limited licenses, or sensitive configurations leading to the development machine (as in the machine on which code is edited) is not suitable or capable of running the code that has been written. There is sometimes some aspect of this in cross platform development. While emulators are often helpful in reducing this, they are not always a suitable solution since emulators don’t emulate 100% of the target platform’s functionality.

When developing for TVs running Tizen(which will be more than just Samsung TVs) Samsung has made available a tool to reduce the cycles from changing code to seeing it run through a tool called WITS.

Setting up WITS

To Setup WITS first you need to have already installed and configured Tizen Studio and Node. The system’s PATH variable must also include the path to tizen-studio/tools and tizen-studio/tools/ide/bin (you’ll need to complete those paths according to the location at which you’ve installed Tizen Studio). You’ll also need to already have a certificate profile defined for your TV.

The files that you need for WITS are hosted on git. Clone the files onto your machine.

git clone https://github.com/Samsung/Wits.git

Enter the Wits folder and install the node dependencies

cd Wits
npm install

Next the folder there is a file named profileInfo.json. The contents of the file must be updated to point to your profiles.xml for your certificate and the name of the certificate profile to use. Windows users, note that when ever you enter a path for Wits you will need to use forward slashes (/), not back slashes (\). For my installation the updated file looks like the following.

{
  "name": "TizenTVTest2",
  "path": "C:/shares/sdks/tizen/tizen-studio-data/profile/profiles.xml"
}

Configuring Wits to Use Your Project

Wits needs to know the location of your project. Open connectionInfo.json. There is an array element named baseAppPaths. Enter the path to your Tizen application here. If you would like to make things convinent within this file also set the “ip” element to the IP address of the TV you are targeting. This isn’t necessary since you will be prompted for it when running a program. But it will default to the value that you enter here.

Running your Project

From the command prompt while in the Wits directory use npm to start the project

npm start

You will be prompted for a number of items. The default values for these items comes from the connectionInfo.json file that you modified in the previous section. You should be able to press enter without changing the values of any of these elements.

PS C:\shares\projects\j2inet\witsTest\Wits> npm start

> Wits@1.0.0 start C:\shares\projects\j2inet\witsTest\Wits
> node app.js

Start Wits............
? Input your Application Path : C:/shares/projects/j2inet/MastercardController/workspace/SystemInfo2
? Input your Application width (1920 or 1280) : 1920
? Input your TV Ip address(If using Emulator, input 0.0.0.0) : 10.11.86.62
? Input your port number : 8498
? Do you want to launch with chrome DevTools? : Yes

A few moments later you’ll see your project running on the TV.

Deploying File Changes

This is where Wits is extremely convenient. If you make a change to a file the application will automatically update on the TV. There’s nothing you need to do. Wits will watch the project for changes and react to them automatically!

Enabling Development Mode on Samsung Tizen TVs

The modern Samsung TVs run the Tizen operating system. You can develop for these just as you might develop for the Tizen based watches. The Tizen TVs are locked down more than the watch is. To deploy to a Tizen TV you’ll need to both enable developer mode and will have to let the TV know from what address it will be receiving code. If it receives request from other addresses it won’t respond to them.

On the consumer displays there is no obvious way to enable developer mode. The option is hidden. If you open the apps browser (for seeing what other apps there are to install) you can open the developer mode menu by entering “12345” on the remote. A popup window will show from which you can select to turn developer mode “On.” If you are using one of the commercial displays (SSSP, or Samsung Smart Signage Platform) the method to enable developer mode is more obvious. If you open the TV’s menu there is an option called URL Launcher Settings. The developer mode option is within these settings.

On the consumer devices you’ll also be asked to enter the IP address of the machine from which the development will occur. This prevents other rouge devices on your network from doing anything to the TV. Here you should enter the IP address of your development machine.

After these options are set the TV needs to be rebooted before the changes are fully applied. you can do this by holding the power button on the consumer TVs for two seconds, holding the power off button on a SSSP display for 2 seconds, or removing the power source from the TV and reapplying it.

After the TV boots developer mode is now enabled. However the mode being enabled doesn’t mean that all of the conditions for deploying code have been met. You will need to generate a distributor certificate also. Samsung has this page with instructions for generating a certificate. In following these directions you will need the the Device Unique ID (DUID). To get this you first need to connect to the TV. I prefer to use the sdb utility that comes with the Tizen SDK. It is located in tizen-studio/tools (adjust this path according to the location at which you installed Tizen Studio). The syntax for connecting is:

sdb connect

Sometimes I have to type the command twice before it takes effect. After the connection is successful open the Tizen Device Manager. You should see the TV connection within the UI. If you right-click on the connection you will have the option of selecting the TV’s DUID. Select this option and copy the DUID to the system clipboard. Keep the DUID on the system clipboard and when it is needed during the certificate generation it will automatically be pasted where it is needed.

If you at some point find that you need the TV extensions, don’t have them installed, and don’t see them in the the package manager you can install them using these instructions. https://developer.samsung.com/tv/develop/tools/tv-extension/download/

Creating a certificate based on the Device Uniuque ID (DUID) is slightly different for the two classes of displays. For the consumer displays a Samsung certificate should be created. For the commercial displays a Tizen certificate should be created. It can be a little confusing with Tizen being a Samsung creation. But you may be able to make better sense of it from another perspective. The Samsung certificate is associated with the Samsung App store. The consumer displays access the app store and the certificate rules for that are different than for apps that have no access to the App Store.

Bixby Studio Available for all Bixby Compatible Devices @SDC19

bixby

Samsung announced today at the annual Developer Conference that Bixby Studio, their developer tool for building natural language interactions, is available on all devices that support Bixby. Previously this functionality was only available on the mobile devices. With today’s announcement it is available on other devices such as the TV, Tizen powered refrigerators, and the watch.

To encourage developers to get started with Bixby development they’ve also opened a contest offering thousands of dollars in prizes. For more information on the contest visit BixbyDevJam.com.

Creating a new Tizen Project for Samsung TVs

The objective of this entry while basic covers an easy mistake to make. It is a mistake that I have made. I’ve got a new Samsung Series 6 TV and I tried to deploy a new project to it. Errors were encountered, frustration levels were raised, but eventually I encountered success.

The Samsung TVs are more locked down than some of the other Tizen devices that I’ve worked with. The more recent ones are more locked down than some of the previous ones. When things go wrong this is what you might see.

The TV I am using runs version 4 of the Tizen operating system. I make a new Tizen project and select to create the new project from the TV templates choosing Tizen 4 as the platform.

TizenNewProject

Attempts to debug the project created from this template fail. I get an error message stating:

Launching [your app name here] has encountered a problem
closed
   closed
     closed

The terminal output isn’t of much help.

Launching the Tizen application...
# If you want to see the detailed information,
# please set the logging level to DEBUG in Preferences and check the log file in 'C:\tizen-studio-data\ide\logs/ide-20191006_014055.log'.

[Initializing the launch environment...]
RDS: Off
Target information: UN43NU6900
Application information: Id(07DOxO8iKR.SystemInfo3), Package Name(07DOxO8iKR), Project Name([your app name here])
Unexpected stop progress...
(0.337 sec)

So what gives? There are two ways to address this that are essentially two paths to the same destination. The manual solution involves editing a couple of configuration options in the files config.xml and .tproject.

The file .tproject is not visible in the Tizen IDE. But you can still open it through file -> open. This file is an XML file. There is an element named that has a sub-element . I changed the value here to tv-samsung-540. The other change in config.xml is on an element of the form . This needs to be changed to .

Why are these changes necessary? I don’t have full confirmation on this, but I believe it has to do with differences between a generic Tizen device and Samsung Tizen devices. At the time of this writing I know of no physical implementations of any non-Samsung TV Tizen devices. But it does exist as a specification.

The other solution would be performed at the creation of the project. When creating a new project do not select from the TV project templates. Instead select the Custom project templates. Within these templates there is a TV template subtype. If you choose this project type then you will start off with the configuration files mentioned above having the values that are needed.

As the Tizen operating system and the development environment are updated year to year more readers will read this entry after a new Tizen version has been released than before. It is likely that the exact values that you include here will be different than what I have used. You may need to update the values accordingly. But hopefully this will point you in the right direction.

Developing for older Samsung TVs

If you already have a Samsung TV and want to start developing for it chances are you don’t have the latest and greatest model. But when you install the Tizen development tools they only target 2 operating system versions; the latest version that is out now and the version that is yet to be released in a year or so. Your TV is too old! So what can you do?

If you check the Tizen development forums the suggestion is to install an older version of the development tools. But that’s no fun! And it is possible to develop for the older TVs with the newer tools. Go ahead and install the latest versions of the Tizen development Studio first. While that is installing you will need to download an older version of the Extensions for TV. You can find them at this site. As you scroll through the available versions you will see that if you attempt to get a version older than the 3.0 version you can’t download it. Download the 3.1 or 4.0 extensions. Don’t worry, the extensions also contain the components needed for TV’s running the 2.3 and 2.4 Tizen version.

tizen extension for tizen sdk

After Tizen Development Studio is installed open the package manager. In the upper right corner of the package manager is a gear icon. Select it.

packagemaker

Expand the “Extensions SDK” area of the window to see the extensions installed and click on the + button to add an extension. A window opens asking for a URL. Leave the URL blank and click on the three dots next to it. You’ll now be asked to navigate to a local archive of the extension you with to add. Navigate to the file that you downloaded earlier and select it. The package manager will take a few moments to install the extension.

When you attempt to create a new project and look at the TV templates available there’s only the 4.0 and 5.0 projects. What gives? The missing project templates can be found under the Custom projects. Select “TV-Samsung v3.0.” Even if you have a TV running Tizen 2.3 this opeion will work. When you click the next button you’ll see the familiar project templates.

My Samsung HoloLab Model Arrived

Last week I received an e-mail from Samsung regarding the HoloLab scans that I did at the 2018 Samsung Developer’s Conference. Shortly after the conference, I wrote about the rig that was used to do the scan.

When the photographs were taken for the scan, three poses were requested. The first pose was standing with your arms crossed. The second pose was standing with both of your arms out to the side. The third pose was allowed to be a freestyle that could be whatever you wanted (just for the fun of it).

Of these three poses, I was most interested in the second pose, because arms out to the side is the most appropriate pose to use when importing a model into software for animating. Sadly, what arrived in my e-mail was only one of the three poses, the first one.

I’m still happy to have received the one pose that I did. The model definitely resembles me. This is speculation on my part, but I imagine that the processing of the 52 images that make up a single scan is time consuming. Considering the large number of participants at the conference who had the scans done, receiving all three model poses may be wishful thinking.

HololabScan

Augmented Reality with Samsung XR SDK

Samsung showed the XR SDK at the 2018 Developers Conference. While Microsoft has generally presented their reality technologies as being along a spectrum (ranging from completely enveloping the user to only placing overlays on the real world) it has always been something that has involved a head mounted device. Samsung presents AR as something that is either viewed through a head mounted device or something that a person views through a portable hand held window into another world. The language used by various companies varies a bit. Microsoft calls the their range of technologies “mixed reality.” Samsung calls theirs SXR which stands for Samsung Extended Reality.

It was several years ago that Samsung first showed it’s take on VR with the release of the Note 4 and the developer’s edition GearVR. The GearVR is now available as a consumer product, but Samsung took an economical approach to initial hardware for head mounted augmented reality. Instead of creating custom hardware they took some off the shelf products and mixed them together to make an economical headset.

Samsung AR Headset — Experimental AR Headset using off the shelf parts

Part	Description	Cost	Source
AR Headset	90° FOV “Drop-In” phones 4.5 inches to 5.5 inches, 180g	65.99 USD	Amazon Alibaba
External Camera	ELP VGA USB camera module with 100° FOV lens	24.69 USD	Amazon
OTG connector	Wavlink USB 3.1 Type C Male to USB 3.0 Type A Female OTG Data Connector Cable Adapter	5.99 USD	Amazon
Total Cost		95.USD

The Samsung XR SDK is almost a super set of the the GearVR SDK. I say “almost” because with a proper super set you would find all the same class names that you would expect from the GearVR SDK. In the Samsung XR SDK the classes exists within a new namespace and have been renamed. GearVR programs could be ported over with some changes to the class names being invoked.

In development is an API standard for AR/VR experiences named OpenXR. Once the standard is defined and released Samsung plans for their XR SDK to be an implementation of this standard.

While the GearVR SDK was specifically for Samsung devices and the Samsung headset the Samsung XR SDK will run on non-Samsung devices for through-the-window AR but will run on the Oculus GO and Samsung devices for stereoscopic experiences.

Linux On Dex: Works on WiFi Tab S4 Models Only

Update 2018-Dec-11: I’ve spoken to a LoD team member and to jump straight to the point of you have a LTE Tab S4 then simply put the required update isn’t available at this time and there is no information on when it will be available.

Some people trying to install Linux on Dex are running into an obstacle. After installing he app and trying to run it they get the following error message.

Linux on Dex requires your device to have the latest software o support some features.

After this message is acknowledge the application closes. If someone with this error checks for updates in the app store or for updates to the operating system they get notification that everything is up to date. What’s going on? I contacted LoD support about this and got back the following response.

Currently, the Linux on DeX(beta) requires latest SW for Galaxy Note9 and Galaxy Tab S4.
SW update schedule may vary depends on the region and carrier.

What does this mean? It means that your device doesn’t have a update that is required for DeX and that your carrier might not have released it. Devices sold through a carrier can be a bit slower in receiving their updates. Samsung hasn’t been specific on the updated needed. I’ve communicated with someone on the Linux on Dex team and was told that LTE tablets in general do not have the update that is required for Linux on Dex. Additionally the person told me that there is no information available on when particular updates will work their way through certain carriers.

BTW: Unlocking your device and installing a SIM from another carrier will not change this; this behaviour is dependent on the carrier for which the device was made, not on the SIM that happens to be in the device at the time.

Samsung Announced Exynos 9 with NPU

Consistent with what they said at the developer’s conference about wanting to extend the reach of their A.I. Samsung has announced a new System on Chip (SoC) with some A.I. related features. The Exynos 9 Series 9820 processor. The processor contains an NPU, a unit for processing neural networks at speeds faster than what could be done with a general purpose processor alone. The presence of this unit on the device hardware makes possible device side experiences that would have previously required that data be sent to a server for processing. This may also translate into improvements in AR and VR experiences.

The NPU isn’t the only upgrade that comes with the processor. Samsung says the 9820’s new fourth generation custom core delivers a 20% improvement in single core performance or 40% in power efficiency compared to is predecessor. Multicore performance is said to be increased around 15%. The Exynos 9820 also has a video encoder capable of decoding 4K video at up to 150 frames per second in 10-bit color. The processor goes into mass production at the end of this year.

Source: Samsung