Hardware & Opensource 4 Methril

A lot of time without news

2010-01-14T21:37:00.007+01:00

I've been busy with my daily/paid job, and i have not be able to put any update to this blog.
We start a new year and it's time to post some updates of whats going on from my part ;)

First, i'm moving to Brazil. This give me a lot of headaches, as i need to do a lot of paperwork. I'm almost finishing this issue, as i'm going to travel in 9 days!!

I would like to say thank you to my TuxBrain coleages (we get fun together and we work nicely together); i could not forget IdaSystems (that always believe in my hard work); news projects evolving like Genesi-USA (they finally sent me the EfikaMX board!! :D), Qi-hardware, Harald Welte & other hackers that are giving some GSM freedom :D; all OpenEmbedded hackers, that give me one of the better development tools that i never tested; all SHR & Openmoko comunity (they persist on this device and give us some usable software in that piece of hardware - and maybe a little bit more); and all the FOSS developers/hackers & communities that i'm involved :D (i don't have enough space to put all of them here).

I don't know if i'm going to post anything before i move, but.. this is my first 2010 post & i'm really happy with my future plans.

See you soon (from the south hemisphere) :D

What i've been doing

2009-09-02T00:22:00.004+02:00

Hello to all specially to openmokers, as this is my first post that is going to appear at planet.openmoko.org

I'm being a little bit silent lately.
The good news is that i've not been quiet :)
What i've been doing? Well, first of all i'm being too busy with a lot of tuxbrain stuff :)
I put a smile because they are giving me the opportunity to develop/hack a lot of devices and they give e the opportunity to hardware hacking, that is not an easy one :)

I've been doing some buzz fixes [1] [2] [3] [4].

I've been hacking some devices [5] [6].

I've been hacking some OE recipes (Porting some shr recipes from import/shr to org.openembedded.dev), and putting some patches [7].

I've been following new interesting companies [8].

And off course i've been having a lot of fun, a real life, a paid job and a wonderful wife that supports me ;) until one holiday week :)

I put this post because i've one specific blog with some new stuff [9] An i.MX515 [10] development platform that i'm going to start to hack.

I'm reading my mails from the last weeks (now last month), and i'm getting up to date.

.....

Stay tunned to know what i've been doing in next weeks :)

Hope to write here soon.

Greetings

--
The links
[1] http://www.openmoko-spain.org/tiki-view_blog_post.php?blogId=1&postId=10
[2] http://www.tuxbrain.com/en/content/buzz-fix-party-barcelona-movie
[3] http://www.tuxbrain.com/en/content/buzz-fix-party-madridphotos
[4] http://www.tuxbrain.com/en/content/there-and-back-againtuxbrain-debconf09-pics
[5] http://www.compulab.co.il/x270em/html/x270-em-datasheet.htm
[6] http://openinkpot.org/wiki/NetronixEB600
[7] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded/25655
[8] http://www.qi-hardware.com/
[9] http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/project/imx515/752
[10] http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=i.MX515

Remember my first OpenSource project

2009-03-03T11:53:00.008+01:00

Today I'm in a melancholic mod. And i started to think about my collaborations to the OpenSource world. I did a lot of experiments at home, but i didn't made it public available, because i wasn't so proud of my code, and I feel scared that someone laughs about my style or my syntax.

I remember my first public project: RTL-EtherBootD is an Open Source project which consists of porting the Ethernet card drivers provided in the Etherboot project to RTLinux. It was my graduate work at University. Since that project, i didn't publish any OpenSource code. I worked in some different environments, but unluckily at my country (Spain) they didn't work a lot with Linux.

I started my actual job very enthusiastic, i was going to work developing Linux in Embedded Systems, but it's not what i'm doing right now :( I'm sad about that, i hope to work in Embedded Linux environments one day, but for now i've to work on this at home.

At work, i started my small patches to u-boot project here. Not really big, but a small step to start doing it more frequently (i've code to submit, but i didn't find it good enough to send it).

Personally, with the OpenMoko project, i started to hack the IDA Systems project, and the build system Openembedded. I found some problems with my working environment at home (Ubuntu 8.10 with a Core2Duo MacBookPro), but i'm solving the environment problems sending some patches to OpenEmbedded.

What i'd like to do is have a day to day work with Linux in Embedded environments, but actually i'm frustrated with a 8-bit PIC micro that i've to develop in Linux environments. Some time before, i was working with 16-bit Motorola uC, at R&D department devolping embedded systems from scratch, for ships. A lot of restrictions: hard-real time, fast response, 3 redundancy communication channels, .... I miss the hardware hacks that i've to do with our prototypes, the evaluation boards and all the stuff. It was funny and i miss the friends that still are there.

For now, i've to see to the future and look for another comfortable environment, Linux, and OpenSource development. I like to don't have to wait too much to find that change.

In my most important project, at the moment (the collaboration with IDA Systems), i suffer from the combination of OpenEmbedded and my environment. I hope to solve this soon. I'm going step by step :)

Now that i wrote some words about my senses, i start to feel better and i can afford my day-to-day job.

See you soon.

-- Edited --
My u-boot patch (the first): http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.boot-loaders.u-boot/44824/focus=45183
My OpenEmbedded patch: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded/21425

Conference at LUG - Madrid

2008-11-09T12:54:00.007+01:00

I'm proud to announce to the community my first presentation about OpenMoko.For the English speakers, i'm so sorry, but it's in english.

The UC3M LUG and the creator of the FDOM distro (es), David Samblas, give me the opportunity to talk about this amazing project.
The event was the Congreso GUL UC3M 2008. A lot of Spanish people talking about OpenSource projects. (i love it :D)

You could see the presentation in two parts.(in Spanish, sorry):

Presentación Openmoko - Neo Freerunner - Parte 1
Cargado por inoxbrain

Presentación Openmoko - Neo Freerunner - Parte 2
Cargado por inoxbrain

And the Presentation in OpenOffice format.

D-BUS working, but not all services available

2008-11-09T12:36:00.007+01:00

Hello to everybody,

well, some progress have been made in the desired port. The DBUS systems is up and more or less working. We'll have he zhone app working properly with DBUS connected into the app. To surf deeply into the API, and the services running, we have some usefull commands, thanks to mdbus app provided by Michael Lauer.

root@em-x270:~# mdbus -s
:1.0
:1.1
:1.2
:1.3
:1.4
:1.5
:1.6
:1.7
org.bluez
org.freedesktop.Avahi
org.freedesktop.DBus
org.freedesktop.Gypsy
org.freesmartphone.frameworkd
org.freesmartphone.odeviced
org.freesmartphone.oeventsd
org.freesmartphone.ogpsd
org.freesmartphone.ogsmd
org.freesmartphone.ophoned
org.freesmartphone.opreferencesd
org.freesmartphone.ousaged

We could see a lot of services, but not all of them are working properly.

Now it's time to write some code to add support for the GSM modem, the WiFI, the bluetooh, the GPS, battery, speakers, ...
A lot of things to test :D

Time to dev a litle bit.

See you soon.

First Openmoko image

2008-09-14T11:16:00.011+02:00

It's a long time since my last post., but here I come back to show you new progress.

I'm being bussy trying to make the poky trunk build system work in my company server. But the config of that server, makes it almost impossible. As the Ida Systems Ltd. guys send me the new phone Openmoko Neo Freerunner as a present, i though that was time to get hands on it (but, keeping in mind the em-x270). After some compiling warnings and errors with the OE environment, i'll found one really nice, in mix with the FSO (http://www.freesmartphone.org) framework that is going to be used with openmoko in the near future (i hope). This environment works, because the openemebedded repository used was the official one, plenty of configurations and machines.

This gives us the opportunity to make the FSO-image for other machines that om-gta01 or om-gta02. This is what i get, a working image for em-x270 :)

Take a look of the em-x270 and the Openmoko Neo Frerunner:

Bootin the board.

First Openmoko Look

A deeper look.

Booting the FSO image.

Zhone started. (Take a look that the dbus system is not working)

zhone out of time :) Left: mls2 Right mls3

The Home in action (another icon fix problem).

The bad things are:

No dbus properly working (i'd like to help the FSO guys to get more hardware working with the framework)
Some of the devices has to be linked with the touchscreen: ln -s /dev/input/touchscreen0 /dev/ts or ln -s /dev/input/touchscreen0 /dev/touchscreen/0 that are the ones that the openmoko uses.

All this stuff is working through NFS, because it's easier to has a dev cross env until everything goes working properly.

Well, it needs some real dev work to get the devices working, but it would be a happy hacking time :)

Some more news soon.

P.D. Ah! I forget to said that the poky system, that has official support to the em-x270 machine, has the icons working properly.