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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, supplied 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.

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Tagged with: hardware • neo 1973 • openmoko
March 8, 2008 23:51

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

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…

Tagged with: arduino • hardware • linux • software
February 18, 2008 16:46

Earlier in the week someone mentioned the Trust 2400p Bluetooth adapter to me. This little 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.

Tagged with: hardware • linux
January 20, 2008 1:07

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