Some notes on hacking a Kobo Wifi with a broken screen:

• Taking the case apart is difficult. A cell-phone repair kit probably would have made things easier.
• There is a serial port available, so I soldered a header on and connected with a USB serial breakout board from Sparkfun. 115200, 8N1.
• There was not enough working screen to set the wifi password without a lot of trial and error. Fortunately I had enough screen to scan for networks and select my AP. With the serial console I was able to hardcode the password in /usr/local/Kobo/configure_wpa_network.sh.
• This file persists across boots.
• I enabled telnet and ftp by following these Kobo Wifi hacking instructions, but editing them directly on the filesystem over the serial console instead of creating a Koboroot.tgz
• I noticed that wget is on the default root filesystem, which seems like an easier way of doing things.
• Debian Wheezy ARMEL packages run on the N647 and N647B models.
• The i2c buses don’t seem to work with the standard Linux I2C tools like i2cdetect, etc.

Here is a dump of the serial console from an N647B model.