The other day I purchased a $10 USD MiFi / WiFi cellular dongle on Aliexpress – Searching MiFi dongle pulls up hundreds of the same model.

I’d wondered if I could get it to support the QXDM DIAG interface so I could use QCsuper to see what’s going on with whatever cellular projects I’m working on.

The device showed up as an rndis_host adapter in Linux, just like a USB NIC, and browsing to the default gateway shows a web UI where amazingly, you can set the IMEI – Pretty sure this isn’t legal…

Oddly I could see it was an Android device, but with no adb port exposed, but wait – does that mean this an Android phone in a USB stick?

After some sleuthing in the awful Web UI I found a model number (UZ801), which led me to this great repo from AlienWolfX with all the info I wanted to know about the device, and critically, how to enable ADB on the device, which is just a matter of going to:

http://192.168.100.1/usbdebug.html

And letting the device reboot, and presto, there it is in ADB:

nick@amanaki:~/Downloads/adbcontrol$ adb devices
List of devices attached
0123456789ABCDEF	device

Not only that, but when I connected to ADB I was already root.

So this is a $10 Android phone without a screen, cool!

Next step was to see if I could enable diag mode, after connecting to adb and running:

setprop sys.usb.config rndis,serial_smd,diag,adb

Alas no DIAG mode serial adapter showed up, despite a few variations on the above.

So with ADB connected could I stream the video from the device and use it like an Android phone?

You betcha:

After poking around in Android I found an App called “Qualcomm Settings” which piqued my interest.

Alas the unit only supports LTE Band 1 / 3 / 5 none of which I have in my office (I’m too lazy to go out to the lab to fire up an Airscale) so I put a public SIM in it and was able to use data, but when I tried to make a call it seems it kicked off CS fallback.

More exploring to do, but pretty amazing what $10 buys you!

Update: Shoutout to theXappy on Twitter who shared their notes on these units, and getting QCsuper running on them: https://github.com/theXappy/UZ801-LTE-USB-MODEM