Jun

4

Computex 2008 Pictures

16 years ago, at the start of June | Leave a Comment

A couple of my colleagues are currently in Taipei attending Computex 2008. There seem to be quite a few eeepc clones and look alikes. Gigabyte Nick is uploading photos to Picasa if you want to take a look – there’s an eeepc album too. Unfortuneately it’s a fairly slow process since it appears he can only upload 5 pictures at a time for some odd reason. ASUS also have a neat GPS unit (R710) with an optional HUD, though he wasn’t sure if some sort of film would be needed on your windscreen to be sure of contrast. There are a couple of pictures of it in the GPS album. There are some exciting new products appearing so keep an eye out for updates. He also stopped by the FIC stand to ask about the Freerunner and Openmoko but, in his words:

“I asked and they said no very dismissively”

which is a huge shame really. They may be different companies (FIC is the parent iirc) but they really should at least try to fein enthusiasm – this is a trade show after all , they are supposed to be trying to get people interested in product. It simply reflects badly on FIC imho.



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June 4, 2008 11:26

Apr

7

Is 3g an important feature?

16 years ago, at the start of April | 27 Comments

A discussion started yesterday on the irc channel with regard to 3g. Most people had made their mind up but we really wanted to see what others thought too. So, to find out how everyone else feels here is a little, totally unofficial poll.

Would you buy a device after the GTA02 that did not have 3g?

  • GPRS is not enough but 3G isn't necessary. EDGE would be okay, too. (16%, 174 Votes)
  • I don't know. (8%, 87 Votes)
  • No. 3g is essential. (48%, 533 Votes)
  • Possibly. If there were enough features added to make upgrading worth it. (14%, 158 Votes)
  • Yes. GPRS and WiFi are fine. (15%, 168 Votes)

Total Voters: 1,120

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April 7, 2008 10:34

Mar

8

How long does yours stay up?

16 years ago, mid-March | 6 Comments

Ok, we all know that the Neo 1973 GTA01 power management isn’t quite there yet but we’ve had the recent good news that NXP have made the user manual available for the PCF50633;

We have carefully reconsidered how to best serve the OpenMoko community in supporting our PCF50633 product, and our decision has been to allow you to publish the full User Manual on the OpenMoko website. This is more effective for the development community then having to reference to 2 documents, being the DS already sent to you and the addendum containing the register description. We therefore prefer that the full UM get’s published. The Company Confidential notice has been removed. We hope to see the successful application of our device and hope to see many OpenMoko products in the market, using our PCF50633.

So really, we should have hundreds of pairs of eyes looking at this for the GTA02. Anyway, in the meantime I’ve been testing out a little battery pack, usb powersupplied by Portable Power Supplies in the UK, which is charged and charges via USB ports. Just the ticket for the Neo GTA01. The unit takes an initial, approximate 6 hours to charge and can be done from a standard USB port on a desktop or laptop. There is also a wall charger available but this obviously bumps up the price. Once charged the unit will happily sit there for months at a time doing nothing, which makes for a good emergency backup. Of course the battery pack will not indicate to the Neo that it can do fast charging but it is capable of doing so – indeed it can serve up a healthy 700ma – but that problem is solved by Bobby Martin (wurp2 irc nick) who has produced a python application to help out. This little application allows you to force the Neo to do fast charging (draw 500ma). Obviously by doing this you override the safety checks, but as I already know that the battery pack is capable of serving more than the Neo will take there’s really no risk here. So far my Neo has been running off it for more than 24 hours and I’d expect it to go on for a lot longer too. This is going to mean that I don’t have to turn off my Neo to save power, especially when I do those overnight trips to and from The Netherlands. I’ll update here when the battery eventually dies, I’m expecting at least 3 or 4 days but we’ll see.

update: at about 4am this morning the Neo had managed to suck the life out of the battery pack and its own battery. This is horrific, showing just how thirsty a Neo is. The total time ended up at about 30 hours, but I’m going to rerun the test to be sure.

update 2: I’ve repeated the test 2 more times now and the results are very similar, sadly.

Standard TipsExtra tipsPower packPower pack button



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March 8, 2008 23:51

Feb

18

USB Controlled RGB Blob

16 years ago, mid-February | 6 Comments

I recently came across a little project which would turn on an LED box when there was mail your gmail account. I thought it was quite interesting and, since I’d had an Arduino Diecimila in my laptop bag for about 6 months and not touched it, I decided to replicate it. The idea was simply to get used to how the Arduino board worked, the project in itself isn’t exactly going to push anyone to their limit. I was right, the code was basically in the examples there was nothing to do. Since we’re selling our house lots of my electronics development stuff has ended up in the loft. I went for a rummage and found some little RGB light globes that a local garden centre had been trying to sell off cheaply at a couple of Euros each. Undoing the screws on the base of the globe revealed a very simple Arduino board

design, I’d just need to tap into the LEDs and disconnect the chip they used. Before any of this was going to happen I needed to build some sort of prototype to at least be sure that the concept was going to work. Since I didn’t have any RGB LEDs or even one of each red, green and blue I had to settle for a small LED board that had come from an old piece of equipment that I’d bought, literally, just for the parts. There was a slight problem. The led board was red, green and errm… orange. It didn’t really matter at this stage, I was only proving the code and making sure that I could get the whole idea to work before destroying the perfectly useless light globes.

The software side was also fairly straight forward too. In the end I used the SimpleMessageSystem library to handle the serial data since I kept running into issues with the standard serial I/O routines. The SimpleMessageSystem routines basically use white space as variable separators and a <CR> to signify the end of input.



Each of the colour channels can have a value between 0 (zero) and 255 which gives a lot of variation. There’s also the option to pulse the mixed colours.

Initially I was just going to have the 3 LEDs change to their relative brightness but then I hit on the idea of having them fade up and down to the correct value. I have to say it looks much better with the gradual change, although I might just add the option of selecting either gradual or instant to the parameter list.

Now, with a simple command, I can set the RGB value of my light globe.

./rgb-globe -l -b 9600 -p/dev/ttyUSB0 -s “1 255 50 0”

The original code for the command line application came from Tod Kurt and was written to be able to send serial data to the Arduino. I did make some modifications, including a couple of virtual slappings of Tod for using strcpy – I still don’t understand why people don’t pretend that function just does not exist.

I’m considering writing a small GTK application that just has a colour picker to select colours, but that would be in addition to the command line application since this is designed to be used from things like scripts or mail and IM notifications or, as I suspect mine will, build status information for my Openmoko buildhost. The only real issue at the moment is that it’s really not bright enough, I think I need to rethink the orb – maybe it’ll be better at night…

The globe/orbThe globe/orb connected to the Arduino board



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February 18, 2008 16:46

Jan

20

Tiny bluetooth adapter

16 years ago, mid-January | 6 Comments

Earlier in the week someone mentioned the Trust 2400p Bluetooth adapter to me. This littleTiny bt-2400p device is tiny and is designed to be installed in a free USB port and then “forgotten” about. I have no idea how well or badly these would function under linux but I’m quite happy to go out and grab one, particularly as the price works out at about £10 / 14 EUR. Since my Acer laptop didn’t come with Bluetooth this should fit nicely in one of the rear USB ports. My only concern is that when using Bluetooth adaptors before I’ve had issues with the wifi dropping out.

update I’ve just snagged myself one of these from a local shop. My SuSe 10.2 install saw it immediately and kbluetooth reported it as Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR which, in theory, should give 3Mbit /sec.

Update 2 This device uses hci_usb as the driver. It’s based on the Cambridge Silicon chipset.

Trust BT-2400p plugged into the back of a laptopTrust BT-2400p next to an AA battery



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January 20, 2008 1:07

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