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I’ll admit it, I’m a Volvo driver. I don’t care who knows it, I love my S80. Recently I decided that I could really do with a decent stash of music for my long trips that I’m making every couple of weeks between the UK and Netherlands. For the longest time I’d been struggling with getting CD’s out of their cases for the single cd, or fighting with the CD Changer jumping at the slightest bump. I finally caved in and purchased an IMIV unit so I could connect an iPod and control it from the stock Volvo head unit. So far it’s working really well, although I seem to have the knack of putting it into firmware upgrade mode. I’m going to email the developers to see if it’s possible to disable the headunit trigger of an update. I’m pretty sure I’m never going to upgrade while in motion which means I’ll have access to the physical unit to switch to update mode. The interesting thing about the IMIV is that you can get it to pretend to be various different devices, mine presents itself to the car as a Mini-disc changer and TV input. This means that I can still have the CD Changer working just by using the IMIV pass through port.

Itunes sucks as it is, but since I don’t use Macs or Windows it means I can’t use that for my music. It’s a bit of a blessing in reality. There are a number of applications for Linux which allow you to manage your iPod, in the end I went with the simple to use, opensource gnupod Perl scripts. The best part of these scripts is the ability to use regex for generating the playlists, something that’s very important with the IMIV.

The IMIV will only work with MELBUS (Mitsubishi Electronics Bus) based Volvo systems, newer Volvos (XC90, new model S40/V50/C70 and S80) use MOST which is apparently fiber optic based.

Tagged with: hardware • linux • opensource • software
January 19, 2008 20:47

I’d been planning to get myself, or at least persuade my wife get me, a tux droid which looks like an interesting piece of hardware to play with. The tux droid has is a wireless penguin which, for a change, only works with Linux. I’m pretty sure you could use cygwin or something if you were a Windows user, but I’m not so I don’t honestly care and obviously I haven’t actually tried it.

Sadly they appear to have just added 20 euro (an increase of nearly 25.5%) to the price for no apparent reason. I suspect they are just trying to cash in on Christmas – A pretty poor show if you ask me. So no Tux for me.

Tagged with: hardware • opensource
December 11, 2007 13:44

After getting a little frantic over my Neo battery life it appears that it has magically cured itself. I had decided that I’d try to eliminate the software side of thing as a cause for my charging issue. Rolling back to a 20071109 version of one of my own builds showed that the Neo was charging perfectly, rolling forward again and it was still happily charging.

Having left it running all night sampling the battery voltage once a second with no failure or reboot, I’m convinced that it was just a freak failure.

Hopefully other people monitoring their battery using the same method will report their findings so we can see if there is any sort of pattern in this.

Tagged with: hardware • neo 1973
November 16, 2007 10:55

I’m a little worried about my Neo 1973, or more precisely it’s battery. We all know that the Neo doesn’t last particularly long with its battery, even after powering down, unless you take the battery out for a few minutes first. The problem started a few days about when my Neo seemed to reboot itself for no apparent reason. I noticed it about three times and thought nothing of it. Until now that is. I’m wondering how many times and for how long the battery can take being plugged into my laptop, getting charged and discharged on an almost daily basis. I’m trying to work it out, my Neo arrived on July 31 2007, If I estimate 1 charge / discharge per day that comes out at only 107 recharges, which is surely well under the life of a battery?

Looking at the graph below it appears that my battery is not charging while the Neo is powered up, or at least, it’s only getting enough charge to keep it at a fairly static level – ie not actually charging over what it takes to run the device.

I’ve Updated the graph because the Neo lost its charge competely, the graph should show this clearly and seems to mirror the results from here

I used a simple bash script to check for the voltage from

/sys/devices/platform/s3c2410-i2c/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/0-0008/battvolt

every second and then dump it to a file on my laptop. The Neo was plugged in via usb. To me the graph, measured over an hour, looks like it’s falling.

So it looks like either my battery and/or the charging circuit is damaged or I’m reading the data wrongly. I’m going to run the battery monitor for a day or so, or at least until the neo reboots itself. Once that is done I’ll put the second battery that I got with the advanced kit and see how that does in the same tests.

Tagged with: hardware • neo 1973
November 15, 2007 13:51

After a somewhat lengthy session trying to get a Neo to boot from and image on SD I’ve finally managed to get it working. It took so long because u-boot is broken. Having taken the risk of flashing u-boot many times I finally found one that works properly and, after flashing, the Neo booted perfectly from SD. Sadly for one person, also trying to achieve the same on their Neo, they have a brick after flashing a bad u-boot. Incidentally, when I say ‘booted perfectly’ what I really mean is it part booted and then I got a kernel panic. This was caused by it not being able to mount the root partition which although I’d created as ext2 didn’t work. A quick reformat as ext3, a recopy of the appropriate files, and it booted without issue.

The good news is that I now have a dual booting Neo with Qtopia and Openmoko, although I don’t know how badly booting like this this will affect the current very poor battery life. At least I can now test either as I want without flashing I might even buy myself a bigger SD card and partition it off and have a number of bootable versions, who knows maybe Android will get on there.

Tagged with: neo 1973 • openmoko • opensource • qtopia • u-boot
November 12, 2007 9:42