My place to share some bits and bytes

After the first mail about my Neo1973 winning was send to the wrong mail address the second arrived.

YAY! :D

I have some goals for this project. Read the following list if you're interested:

• Port OpenMoko framework to the Motorola EZX phones. This includes making the Motorola TS07.10 vendor specifiec stuff ready for the new kernel infrastructure and getting the GUI ready for 240x320 and looking foreward into dialpad only handling. A lot work and a lot fun. I hope we have something nice in Q3 2007.
• Sync with a linux desktop. One of the things I was pissed of by the most cellphones, even the linux ones, is the bad sync possibilities with a linux desktop. Why should we not be allowed to manage our contacs on desktop an cellphone without a hassle? This needs to be fixed.
• GPS navigation under linux. This also itching me for a long time. I like to see two solutions here. First something working based on navit, maemo mapper, gps drive, etc. Using existing map data is fine for the start. Second step should be a always running and *easy* to use openstreetmap data logger. Not only gps tracks, but also something that allows tagging streets and POIs right while walking/driving. The current technics of osm are good, but need to be improved with 'smart autotagging' and easy clientsoftware.
• Suppourt for more phones. I like to see OpenMoko on as many phones as possible. For EZX phones we have already people promised to get it ready. I heard also about somebody like to start the work for the HTC linux port. What's about greenphone and all the other linux smartphones? If you're doing work in this area please add it to the wiki, it will open 2007-02-11. Whenever I'll get my hands on such a device I'll even take a look myself.

After a lot pestering from mickeyl I submitted a talk proposal about OpenEZX for the FOSDEM 2007 embedded track.

Today I got a mail that it was accepted. That's both, good and bad.

The bad thing is that I'm shy to have talks in english. I'm fine with my written english, but miss a lot pratice in the spoken language. Anyway, with good preparation it should be ok.

And now to the good stuff. :)

I like to spread the word about OpenEZX. Especially after all the progress I made together with Daniel and Jan on the mux_cli driver. We are pretty sure that the kernel side is almost done yet. Next week we will play with some GPE/MKPhone setups to try voice call and sms. If we have luck the BP handle the audio for voice calls on is own, without needed sound driver. We shall see.

This brings me to the second good thing about this talk. OpenMoko source will be released on 2007-02-11. This means we can have some tests with OpenMoko/OpenEZX integration which I can include in the talk. I'm still very exicted about OpenMoko. It's the right way to go.

So if you're at FOSDEM and want to talk with me about OpenEZX you will find me in the embedded room. Talking with people, hacking on Open{EZX, Moko} or just hanging around with friends.

Today and tonight I spend a couple of hours working with openstreetmap.org.

After all the suggestions on the openmoko list about using the Neo1973 as device for collecting GPS data for the openstreetmaps projects, I was interested how the whole thing work.

Long time ago I made wardriving trip through my home village. I had a gps reciever with me and the whole gps data was collected from Kismet. Now you can think how happy I was to be able converting this gps traces and uploading them to openstreetmaps. :)

After this initial step I needed more then 3 hours to get the streets roughly named and edited. I guess I'll need at least 20 more hours to get it in a really useful state.

And that's my biggest concern about it atm. Collecting data with the Neo should be fine and helps to project, but the hardest job is to get all the tagging and editing right. I don't see how the Neo could help here. Of course there is hope that some people doing the gps traces editing the stuff afterwards, but I would not count to much on it.

Don't get me wrong, I really like this project, it's the best we have in this area, but I'm not sure if it will ever reaches a state where it is useful for the masses. Anyway, I will make gps traces from my next journeys and upload them. And I also hope to have the time finish the work on my home village.

Today I stumpled again over xoo. Interesting if you develop a GUI an your host and not on the embedded device.

To play with it I resized the Neo1973 Mock-up from openmoko.com and wrote a xml description for it. You can download the stuff here.

Using it with xoo:

xoo --device /path/to/neo1973.xml

It's not really useable as you need a high resolution to get the window fully displayed and are not able to emulate the awesome 285dpi of the device.

A screenshot on a 1280x1024 screen.

Anyway, I hope you have some fun with it.

Harald borrowed me his E2. After some first small tests I was able to identify the needed changes from all other changes dotmonkey had made to the code he send to the ml.

Changes for product ID, usb endpoints and load address was needed. That's all.

I'm on the way to merge the needed changes in our boot_usb svn and make a release of it afterwards.

But I have some more good news. With the working boot_usb I was able to load a selfcompiled 2.4 E680 kernel on the phone. That is great as it means there are not to much code changes needed for our ezx patchset.

As stated we had a small OpenEZX meeting during the 23C3.

It was the first time Jan, Daniel and me meet Harald and Mickey in reallife. Nice guys. We had some talk about OpenMoko OpenEZX integration and about OpenEZX in general:

• Finishing the mux_cli driver. If we are able to send an ATD we are perhaps even able to do a real call. It could be that the audio handling for a voice call is done by the BP itself and no ALSA driver is needed for it. We will see.
• If the BP don't handle it himself the ALSA driver porting needs also a high priority.
• 48 MB RAM could become a problem for the OpenMoko software stack. Hopefully some optimizations will make it work.
• We made some pictures of an A1200 board. They are already in the wiki.
• Harald borrowed me his ROKR E2. I already started playing with it. See my other blog entry.