Handhelds, Linux and Heros

LinuxTag 2008 will be great for people interested in mobile and embedded Linux. I do not know about all the projects that will have a booth there, but GPE, GPE Phone Edition, QuantumSTEP and OpenEmbedded will be there at least. The application for a booth for these projects was accepted some days ago.

LinuxTag is one of the largest and most interesting Open Source events in Europe. It is known to be a great forum for meeting all sorts of people interested in Open Source - LinuxTag attracts developers, business people and users in equal measure. It will take place in Berlin from May 28th till May 31st

A big thanks to the LinuxTag people and the booth sponsors for the opportunity to show what we are doing.

For OpenEmbedded event planning we have a wiki page that can be found here.

Making a useful mobile Logic Analyzer is quite a challenge, but the basic needs are there. sump.org has a nice VHDL design and Java software for a 32 channel Logic Analyzer
based on a Xilinx Spartan FPGA. The whole design is GPL licensed. The current VHDL implementation is available for several Xilinx FPGA evaluation boards and uses a serial port for communication with a device (usually a PC) running the GUI software. The FPGA board takes care about sampling and buffering of the sample data before it is transferred to the controlling device.

Robert Schuster of tarent did a great job to get the Java software running on a Nokia N800 and on the Neo1973.

It was not too complicated to make the VHDL part work on an inexpensive Spartan-3E eval board. This hardware of course does not really fit the needs for two reasons: First it is too big to accompany a mobile consumer device such as a N810 or the Neo 1973. Second it does not support other input signal levels than 3.3V which is a real showstopper. A better hardware design that fits the needs based on a small FPGA industry module, a battery and some line drivers would be easy to do… but that’s something for a new story later :-) Before that I need to get a serial connection from a N810 to the board and check how the software performs on this device…

The board I used for my test was a Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kit.Ther is quite some room for improvement since a a major share of the FPGAs blocks are unused and it does not yet make much of use of all the nice features on the board such as external RAM, flash, display and USB.

Additional screenshots can be found at http://scap.linuxtogo.org.

The release 2.8 of GPE is complete and available for download. The new release comes with a large number of bugfixes and improvements such as an improved calendar, many fixed import/export and synchronisation issues as well as support for Maemo in additional components like Starling (the new audio player) and gpe-filemanager.

The full announcement can be found here.

Many thanks to all the contributors that made this release possible!

Enjoy… and happy hacking :-)

With the help of some nice French colleagues I was able to create a GPE Phone Edition image for a HTC Tornado. I was quite impressed how much of the user interface stuff works even without having a touchscreen. Now we only need some hero to make the GSM modem work - using this cute little phone with G(PE)² would be pretty cool. But well even with a working hardware platform there still quite a lot of work to do. The most important missing feature is a working text input method for devices with a numeric keypad.

Many thanks to the people who were involved into porting Linux to these devices, in particular Vivien and Nicolas.

Of course I have images available for testing again. They are available from here. I used the 128MB Mini-SD card shipped with my N800 and put Haret, zImage and the configuration file on a FAT partition. The second partition on the poor SD card contains the ext3 root filesystem. Depending on your filesystem layout on the phone you need to create a directory tree to put the haret configuration in, that path seems to be hardcoded into the binary from Nicolas’ website. Please note that Haret only works on unlocked phones.

If you have comments or questions just drom me a mail… enjoy!