copyleft hardware planet

How did we get there

2010-03-11T00:55:03+00:00

Repost of original vegyraupe wich Tuxbrain suscribe totally, due we share the same vision :)

Original:how did we get here « sharism.cc

Sharism has launched, the NanoNote is widely available and the pieces for other copyleft hardware projects are coming together. It is time to take a step back, pause for a minute and look at the road behind us. Not to wonder, but to realise what we have accomplished and what we still want to achieve. This is the first of a serious of posts shedding light on the history and more importantly the vision of Sharism at Work.

tarte

2010-03-10T23:28:53+00:00

how did we get here

2010-03-10T22:37:13+00:00

Sharism has launched, the NanoNote is widely available and the pieces for other copyleft hardware projects are coming together. It is time to take a step back, pause for a minute and look at the road behind us. Not to wonder, but to realise what we have accomplished and what we still want to achieve. This is the first of a serious of posts shedding light on the history and more importantly the vision of Sharism at Work.

Moving through the history of the different personalities in our team, there are countless anecdotes and dreams that played their part. However, there are three things that always come up: security, the drive for freedom and the wish for true innovation.

After having worked in various companies and projects ranging from simple web development to complex, embedded systems all of us realised the great danger for the user’s privacy and security. Do you know what all the chips in your all-you-ever-want phone do? Are you sure that only you can control all data on your devices? Sure, this sounds paranoid, but think about it. Recent developments, such as the “Telekom scandal” in Germany and the IPRED law in Sweden have shown that customer data is not private per se. Play with this scenario a bit longer and you will see that the step to using micro chips to gather information on the individual user is not that big and who can be sure that it hasn’t been taken already? So our answer is: know your device! Only once the user has knowledge of ever piece of technology in his/her hardware and can decide what should or shouldn’t happen, do we regain real privacy and are free again.

Running whatever you want, whenever you want it is of course a huge aspect in freedom. Who is to say that your piece of hardware can only be used for this one particular action? Or what if you wanted to adapt a device to fit your needs? Right now you have almost no chance of getting exactly what you want. There will always be trade offs. We want to create a culture where sharing hardware designs is as common as sharing software. Imagine development kits for handhelds, a beginners kit for mobiles or a book titled “How to build your own toaster”. Why would we not take the liberty to build exactly what ‘we’ want, not what ‘they’ give us? You do it every day already, when you mix and match the software you want, and need, on your computer. Of course hardware is more complex and we don’t want to reinvent everything over and over again.

Inventions and innovation have become so complex that they are almost out of reach for the simple person. Even huge companies struggle to get the basics every now and again. The vast spectrum of products that are almost alike, and yet have different qualities and different values of effectiveness, shows that due to modern culture we reinvent stuff all the time. Looking at new technologies as the prime example. Once a new product is released, the other players on the market try to offer the same or similar functionality, but they have to start all over again. Just think. 5 R&D centers trying to innovate will fight the same problems and the same hurdles to achieve a single goal. Wouldn’t it be just natural if they’d work together? Isn’t the very basis of human interaction collaboration? We are not advocating a single R&D effort but innovation on a whole new level, where knowledge and resources are combined to create true competition on quality rather than just simple features.

To be continued :)

First Elphel Eyesis Prototype assembled

2010-03-10T22:00:43+00:00

Andrey spent months of planning and designing these parts and yesterday we finally had the joy of assembling the first panoramic camera head prototype utilising 9 sensor boards. This new panoramic camera head is called Elphel Eyesis. A few metal parts are still missing but the heart of the system – the optical part – [...]

The XO Laptop with Handle Almost Removed [Flickr]

2010-03-10T18:15:52+00:00

Wayan Vota posted a photo:

Read more at OLPC News

XO Laptop Repair Bench at OLPC Learning Club DC Meetup

2010-03-10T18:15:46+00:00

Wayan Vota posted a photo:

Read more at OLPC News

Now where is that little screw for the XO? [Flickr]

2010-03-10T18:15:40+00:00

Wayan Vota posted a photo:

Read more at OLPC News

Just snap off the handle guard like this...

2010-03-10T18:15:32+00:00

Wayan Vota posted a photo:

Read more at OLPC News

Arduino NYC Meetup — Update

2010-03-10T17:33:32+00:00

Thanks to everyone who RSVP’ed for the NYC meetup mentioned earlier. It will be at ITP on Saturday March 20 from noon to 6 PM. There is no set agenda for the day, it’s simply an open meetup. We want to meet folks using Arduino.

We’ll also be meeting for drinks later that evening at a bar nearby, location TBA. So if you can’t make the meetup, come later for that. Watch this space for details.

We can accommodate about 100 people comfortably without disrupting student work on the floor. Based on the RSVPs we’ve gotten, we have slots for a couple dozen more. So if you’re interested and haven’t RSVP’ed, please send mail to team@arduino.cc. I’ll post again if we run out of room. Looking forward to meeting you all.

Keep it going.

2010-03-10T11:05:01+00:00

Long time no blog post - and a lot has happened, really!

First, let's start with some OS development.

The OS is getting better and better. We will probably add another minimal menu, similar to gmenu2x with no fancy effects and graphics but PND-Support.

This is for all the purists of you.

Also, notaz and DJWillis are slowly stepping forward in getting WiFi working.

While it's not perfect, the packet loss is decreasing and things are getting better.

It might still be a long way (or it might be finished soon, you never know with such things), but it's improving.

I also successfully managed to setup a Bluetooth PAN connection to my mobile phone. I got an IP address via DHCP, I got DNS resolving and I could ping the phone.

Pinging websites outside of the phone didn't work yet, but that might be my mobile phone (custom cooked ROM, never tried Bluetooth PAN before).

As I did use the terminal to set that up (it only takes a few lines to do so), the next step is including this into the Network Manager.

Next let's go on to the Mass Production:

As most of you already know, we moved the assembly from US to UK - we'll do it ourselves!

This is because the company in US finally gave us a price for doing this - a ridiculous high price.

The boards will still be populated there, but we will assemble the units ourselves. Craig is currently setting up the village hall to turn into a proper place to do this, including buying everything needed (ESD stuff, etc.)

Our current roadmap is like this:

(note: It still depends on the case production and on the board production. This is based on the dates they did tell us - but as we already experienced a few times, we are a small client for them and therefore have low priority... let's hope they keep their dates this time!)

March 18th: Production of 1000 cases is finished and will be shipped to UK.

March 22nd: 1000 cases will arrive in UK and will be inspected. If all is well, the next 3000 will go into production.

March 22th - March 26th: 500 populated and tested boards and all parts will be shipped to UK.

Approx. April 1st: Assembly will start.

Yep, another promise broken - whereas the company in Texas told us they can test 1000 boards a week before, it's now down to 500 boards a week.

At least they kept their shipping dates for all the prototypes and testing boards so far, so March 22th - March 26th should hopefully be fine.

Some parts already started to arrive in UK, e.g. the PSUs are there.

We decided to start on April 1st to have a small bufferzone for the stuff to arrive.

It doesn't make much sense if we all sit around in the village hall without having any parts to build together :)

The complete assembly process will be broadcasted live via Webcam. That will be fun!

BTW:

The Pandora stirred up a lot of interest in Germany currently.

I've been at the CeBIT in Germany doing a presentation about the OpenSource gaming handhelds and of course the Pandora.

It was crowded.

Thanks to Radio Tux, you can listen to the presentation.

You can also download the PDF I used for it here.

They also did another interview here.

And if anybody wants to watch it, we've got the full thing available as video on Youtube here.

Beware, it's all in German!

After the presentation, a lot of guys (some from the community as well) could get their hands on the Pandora and play with it.

They all loved how well the controls and the keyboard work. Looks like our design is working well :)

That's it for today - hopefully we have good news within the next two weeks!

mein erstes Atelier

2010-03-09T22:22:33+00:00

[Thingamagoop 2]

Beetlebum about Arduino

2010-03-09T09:59:21+00:00

I was checking the statistics on the server this morning, when I discovered a couple of hundreds hits coming from a German illustrator (Johannes Kretzschmar) that posts his comics about technology in the form of a blog. Take a look at the one for today … one image sometimes counts more than 1000 words.

Arduino on Beetlebum.de, copyright by the author, 2010

For more illustrated fun, visit: Beetlebum.de

NanoNote on Hackable:Devices

2010-03-09T09:04:45+00:00

The NanoNote is conquering Europe!

It is now also available from Hackable:Devices.

The price is 99€ plus shipping.

One Laptop Per Child Works - With Teachers

2010-03-08T17:54:07+00:00

One of the major innovations of OLPC consists in the idea that a computer given to a single child (also called 1:1 computing) is the best way to enhance the pupil's ability to learn effectively. It's called ONE-laptop-per-child after all.

In a recent article in ScienceDaily, strong evidence is presented that shows that 1:1 computing allows students in these programs to outperform their peers in traditional classrooms. According to findings of studies published in the Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment:

1:1 laptop use works

Students who have participated in 1:1 computing report higher achievement and increased engagement. This new collection of articles brings together some of the best evidence to date on the implementation and impacts of 1:1 computing.

All of the studies that examined the impact of 1:1 computing on student achievement found that students in the 1:1 settings outperformed their traditional classroom peers on English/Language Arts standardized tests by a statistically significant margin. Study authors also reported on evidence of increased student motivation and engagement, as well as changes in teachers' instructional practices.

This is great news for OLPC. So far the evidence of the effectiveness of 1:1 computing was circumstantial and anecdotal. These are the kind of studies that OLPC should have not only follow closely, but also actively sponsor, and possibly enhance with their own on-the-field experiences and surveys. Although that was never done, it is never too late for OLPC to back up such studies, and to provide additional supporting data.

Teachers matter in 1:1 success

Regardless of the OPLC involvement, the outcomes of these studies is clear. Is this a clear strong, although indirect victory or endorsement for OLPC? Not really. The article clearly states:

"One of the most salient findings was the critical role that teachers played in the success of each 1:1 program," Bebell said. Additional factors critical to student success across 1:1 technology settings included:
Having a strong commitment from school leadership
Developing consistent and supportive administrative policies
Creating professional development opportunities for teachers, particularly the sharing of best practices

This doesn't work

It appears that the key for success of the 1:1 computing initiative are teacher involvement and a strong school commitment. In other words, handing out laptops to individual students and let them to learn independently, is not what is found to work effectively. Teachers' involvement, training and professional development is the real key for success. Unfortunately, on a global scale OLPC performs poorly in this regards.

Teachers' training and professional and curricula development is left to local groups and and it happens countries where the role of teachers has been recognized. It should not be a surprise to note that in these countries the OLPC initiative is known to have been the most effective. When such local involvement of teacher' training and curricula development was missing, the program has not shown any significant sign of success.

Therefore, having a global push for sharing experiences, promoting teachers' collaboration and training is the determining factor for the success of the overall OLPC effort.

It is unfortunate and heart shuttering to witness OLPC lack of recognition of the relevance of teachers involvement in the learning process. A laptop will never be able to replace a teacher. It will only be an effective tool for students to improve their learning and teacher to extend their teaching. Scientific evidence now backs this strongly. Let's hope OLPC will follow.

Réunion Breizh Entropy Congress (BEC), 19 mars

2010-03-08T16:09:13+00:00

Vous êtes invités à une réunion d’organisation du BEC qui aura lieu le jeudi 18 mars à 20:30 au Golden Gate Cafe, 3 rue St Georges à Rennes.

Au programme:
* rappel des créneaux et salles disponibles: 013, 014 et 015 au sous-sol du bâtiment 2A de la fac Beaulieu de 10:00 à 18:00 le 16/04 et 17/04. 3 salles de 50 personnes, deux seront allouées pour 2 tracks de conférences (pour un total de 32 slots) et la 3e pour workshops/expositions/socialisation/posters/nerdage.
* vote des propositions (les personnes du comité de programmation ne pouvant pas etre présentes enverront leurs votes par mail avant la réunion)
* matos et salle pour le concert du 15
* comm post-CFP: logo, web, affiches et flyers couleur
* inscriptions en ligne des visiteurs
* restauration
* équipement des salles
* hébergement des conférenciers
* streaming et enregistrement des confs
* signalétique sur le site

Milkymist 0.4 released

2010-03-08T16:04:16+00:00

ChangeLog:

New, light Ethernet MAC (Minimac). We are looking for a developer to write a Linux driver for it – mail devel AT lists.milkymist.org if you are interested.
TFTP network boot from the BIOS. This should make Linux kernel development a lot easier, by drastically reducing the time it takes to load a new kernel! The network configuration is described in this document.
Fixed a bug with linear interpolations in TMU2 (reported by Jacky).

Arduino

2010-03-07T23:13:02+00:00

[Arduino]

Floorplanning with Magic, how hard can that be ?

2010-03-07T00:12:35+00:00

Alliance VLSI development cycle has stalled and there are many software compatibility issues that need to be solved before getting a proper (one that can meet the industry’s needs) digital backend flow with opensource software. Herb which was meant as a clone for Alliance VLSI will not be stable enough at the end of this year, nor I would expect some Mixed-Signal designs from it.

Since it won’t be TCL based, I doubt I would even use Herb myself. Hence, I’m investigating further on what should be done before one can design a mixed signal chip with the industry’s requirements.

Magic VLSI is fairly analog oriented, it is TCL based and it is lambda based. Since it is TCL based, it deserves credits. But being lambda based it makes it hard to go beyond 90nm process node with it since it won’t be accurate enough. Surely a timing correlation would prove this.

Magic’s 2 grid cells normally represent the length of the transistor. However, macro models of SRAM/ROM available in the LEF format include decimal points to reflect the position of different metal layers and vias. This is a major drawback with Magic VLSI.

Achieving digital implementation with Magic would certainly require new techniques about how to use magic itself and how metrics (resistances, capacitances, switching activities,..) are extracted.

I started today with a case scenario: try to get a simple floorplan setup with some macro models. Nigel Nordsworth has kindly forwarded some Macro models. He is FEL’s test contributor for more than a year now. As mentioned above, LEF files might include X and Y positions with 3 decimal points in microns. Hence, to load the macro models, these X and Y positions should be multiplied by 1000 and thereby converting them into the nanometer scale.

Our current possible solution would be to use a Magic’s grid cell to represent 1 nm². This is not how one would normally use Magic. The complexity slope rises as all the tech files should be revisited and possibly be project dependent. Being project dependent, the solution would not be useful for the normal user. But once we can get a proper TCL package with can help us rotate the macro models and one of the 3 internal routers of magic can actually do some power routings (VDD and GND), we will present our solution for standardization.

instance_name ""
foreach instance [ cellname list instances ] {
    if { $instance == $element_name } {
         set instance_name $element_name
    }
}

select cell $instance_name
instance celldef $instance_name

regsub {\.} $xl {} xl
regsub {\.} $yl {} yl
move to $xl $yl

puts "Info: Moved the following selected Macro to ($xl,$yl)"

Using the above TCL commands just to move around the macro model I believe that a digital implementation should be feasible with Magic VLSI. But some intelligent mechanisms should be investigated about the timing and power correlations. As I wrote in the past, coupled with IRSIM we can even estimate leakage power out of the design during standby mode.

It should be exciting to design low power and low voltage designs.

Próximo 13 de Marzo de 2010 Arduino Workshop en Cerdanyola

2010-03-05T08:20:13+00:00

Gracias a la amabilidad de los chicos del null-lab de Cerdanyola en especial Irraz, podremos relizar este taller

pensando para todos los públicos y no iniciados, que quieran conocer más afondo las bondades del hardware libre y más

concretamente del Arduino. Ofreciendo este taller de iniciación.

Podeis consutar la ultima hora y acutalizaciones de este evento en el wiki del null-lab

OsmocomBB now performing location updating procedure against GSM cell

2010-03-05T01:00:00+00:00

I haven't had much time for blogging recently, too much exciting work going on at OsmocomBB:

we now have simplistic support for Uplink (transmit) on SDCCH/4
we have a minimal Layer2 (LAPDm) implementation
we can send LOCATION UPDATING REQUEST to the network, and receive the respective response
there's wireshark integration, i.e. all packets on the L1-L2 interface can be sent into wireshark for protocol analysis

There are still many limitations, but this is a major milestone in the project: We have working bi-directional communication from the phone to the network!

The limitations include:

The cell has to use a combined CCCH (SDCCH/4 on timeslot 0)
The cell has to use no encryption/authentication
The layer2 is not finished, especially re-transmissions will not work yet
There's no power control loop yet
There's no timing advance correction

However, most of those are more or less simple we know what needs to be done, its just a matter of getting it done kind of tasks. There are no big unknowns involved, and particularly no further reverse-engineering of the hardware is required.

Also, the existence of a stable bi-directional communications channel between the network and the phone means that anyone interested in working on the higher layers can now actually do so. Completing and testing layer2 as well as RR/MM/CC on layer3 is a major task in itself, and it definitely requires the lower layers to be there.

The other good part is that development of layer2 and layer3 can happen entirely on the host PC, where debugging is much easier and there's no need for cross-compilation and we can use all the usual debugging options (gdb, valgrind, ...)

I'm now almost heading off for holidays (starting March 10), so don't expect any major progress from me anytime soon. I hope other interested developers will be able to take it from here and fill in some missing gaps until I'll get back.

Helping an OLPC Deployment in Gabon

2010-03-04T20:01:47+00:00

Pass saturday, I met with the team that will go to Libreville in Gabon, Africa this month to deploy 110 XO laptops in a school. You can have more details about the OLPCorps LavalUniversity Gabonproject.

The team launched a call for help to the local LUG for helping them be sure that everything is alright before they got there. They want to confirm that all the hardwares, softwares, procedures, etc are good and without error. The project team did a really good job and I think they are ready to go there but a validation before leaving is a great initiative.

What impress me is the answer they got from the community. In a short time, all the aspect of the project was covered! The project is heavily based on wireless architecture so a local group ZAP Québec jump in and offer their help to validate this part of the setup. For the software part (School Server, XO install, etc) and procedures, Rene and me will do the validation.

I was really impressed that many groups joined their efforts and gave their free time to help such a good project. I also like the impression we gave of our community to the project team. We often hear that the free softwares community is a place where people help each other. I am happy to have seen this in action and do my part.

Jeff Saucier wrote OLPC deployment in Gabon and its republished here with his permission

Elektor talks about Arduino

2010-03-03T13:41:34+00:00

Europeans are used to the fact that we are a conglomerate of multiple cultures. This affects more or less everything, even the press. When it comes to the maker culture, the US has the advantage of having a single market, a single language, and a single culture. On the other hand, Elektor is a brand that has been since long time ago aware of the fact there are people who don’t speak multiple languages (like e.g. English). Therefore their magazine has been published in different languages in different countries since as far as I can remember. At some point I was collecting it in Dutch, German, English and Spanish. You could find the January article on ARM from the Spanish issue, in the Februrary Dutch one, or in the May German one … and vice-versa.

Cover

Page 12

Page 13

March 2010, Elektor’s English edition brings an article on 20 Open Source Tools. Arduino is featured as the first one of a series of tools that we all admire. It is really nice to be featured in Elektor (though I know it is not the first time, there have been several articles before where readers were using the Arduino board to develop their projects). This same issue brings a very interesting article titled Small & Open Source embedded operating systems that can run on AVR … this means you could probably run many of those small OS on one of the Arduino board models.

See the OLS in action!

2010-03-03T10:30:09+00:00

Here is a video of the OLS debugging UART communications.

forgotten attachment detector

2010-03-02T22:47:39+00:00

Linux 2.6.33 features for embedded systems

2010-03-02T10:38:55+00:00

Interesting features for embedded Linux system developers

Linux 2.6.33 was out on Feb. 24, 2010, and to incite you to try this new kernel in your embedded Linux products, here are features you could be interested in.

The first news is the availability of the LZO algorithm for kernel and initramfs compression. Linux 2.6.30 already introduced LZMA and BZIP2 compression options, which could significantly reduce the size of the kernel and initramfs images, but at the cost of much increased decompression time. LZO compression is a nice alternative. Though its compression rate is not as good as that of ZLIB (10 to 15% larger files), decompression time is much faster than with other algorithms. See our benchmarks. We reduced boot time by 200 ms on our at91 arm system, and the savings could even increase with bigger kernels.

This feature was implemented by my colleague Albin Tonnerre. It is currently available on x86 and arm (commit, commit, commit, commit), and according to Russell King, the arm maintainer, it should become the default compression option on this platform. This compressor can also be used on mips, thanks to Wu Zhangjin (commit).

For systems lacking RAM resources, a new useful feature is Compcache, which allows to swap application memory to a compressed cache in RAM. In practise, this technique increases the amount of RAM that applications can use. This could allow your embedded system or your netbook to run applications or environments it couldn’t execute before. This technique can also be a worthy alternative to on-disk swap in servers or desktops which do need a swap partition, as access performance is much improved. See this LWN.net article for details.

This new kernel also carries lots of improvements on embedded platforms, especially on the popular TI OMAP platform. In particular, we noticed early support to the IGEPv2 board, a very attractive platform based on the TI OMAP 3530 processor, much better than the Beagle Board for a very similar price. We have started to use it in customer projects, and we hope to contribute to its full support in the mainline kernel.

Another interesting feature of Linux 2.6.33 is the improvements in the capabilities of the perf tool. In particular, perf probe allows to insert Kprobes probes through the command line. Instead of SystemTap, which relied on kernel modules, perf probe now relies on a sysfs interface to pass probes to the kernel. This means that you no longer need a compiler and kernel headers to produce your probes. This made it difficult to port SystemTap to embedded platforms. The arm architecture doesn’t have performance counters in the mainline kernel yet (other architectures do), but patches are available. This carries the promise to be able to use probe tools like SystemTap at last on embedded architectures, all the more if SystemTap gets ported to this new infrastructure.

Other noticeable improvements in this release are the ability to mount ext3 and ext2 filesystems with just an ext4 driver, a lightweight RCU implementation, as well as the ability to change the default blinking cursor that is shown at boot time.

Unfortunately, each kernel release doesn’t only carry good news. Android patches got dropped from this release, because of a lack of interest from Google to maintain them. These are sad news and a threat for Android users who may end up without the ability to use newer kernel features and releases. Let’s hope that Google will once more realize the value of converging with the mainline Linux community. I hope that key contributors that this company employs (Andrew Morton in particular) will help to solve this issue.

As usual, this was just a selection. You will probably find many other interesting features on the Linux Changes page for Linux 2.6.33.

Buildroot 2010.02 released, contributions from Free Electrons!

2010-03-02T10:22:30+00:00

Buildroot is a embedded Linux system build system. It automates the process of downloading, configuring, compiling and installating all the components of an embedded Linux system, from Busybox to more complicated software stacks using Gtk, Qt, X.org, Gstreamer, etc. Buildroot is easy to use and extend, making it a nice choice for small to medium-sized embedded Linux systems.

As promised by the fixed-release schedule, a 2010.02 release has been published on Friday, with numerous improvements over the previous version 2009.11, many of which are part of the general cleanup process that the project is doing since the beginning of 2009. These improvements are detailed in the project CHANGES file.

Thomas Petazzoni, from Free Electrons, implemented several of these improvements :

Creation of a package infrastructure for non-autotools packages. Buildroot had for a long time an infrastructure to factorize the code needed to build packages based on the autotools build systems. But all other packages were using hand-made Makefiles, which were hard to write and generated a lot of code duplication. Therefore, we have introduced an infrastructure that makes adding new packages much easier, and which allows us to cleanup the existing codebase significantly by factorizing a lot of common code. The autotools infrastructure has also been reworked on top of the generic infrastructure to avoid code duplication as well. At the same time, we have significantly improved the documentation on how to add new packages. This infrastructure is a building block that will allow us to easily add more features to all packages in Buildroot (such as package generation).
Removal of the external toolchain source mechanism, which was merged with the normal toolchain building procedure. This special casing was implemented to allow the compilation of AVR32 toolchains, but such an additional complexity wasn’t needed. Now, Buildroot continues to build AVR32 toolchains as it used to do, but the code is much cleaner. Another illustration of our large cleanup effort.
Many, many, many fixes to different packages, many of them to ensure that we do not depend on development packages being installed on the host. This is very important to ensure that our build procedure is as independent as possible from the development machine configuration.

From the list of contributors, ordered by the number of patches, Thomas Petazzoni of Free Electrons has been the first Buildroot contributor for this last release :

$ git shortlog -e -n -s 2009.11..2010.02
139 Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>
124 Peter Korsgaard <jacmet@sunsite.dk>
26  Lionel Landwerlin <llandwerlin@gmail.com>
23  Gustavo Zacarias <gustavo@zacarias.com.ar>
7   Julien Boibessot <julien.boibessot@armadeus.com>
4   Nigel Kukard <nkukard@lbsd.net>
4   Sven Neumann <s.neumann@raumfeld.com>
2   Anders Darander <ad@datarespons.se>
2   Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com>
2   Daniel Mack <daniel@caiaq.de>
2   H Hartley Sweeten <hartleys@visionengravers.com>
2   Richard van Paasen <rvpaasen@t3i.nl>
2   Will Wagner <will_wagner@carallon.com>
2   William Wagner <will_wagner@carallon.com>
2   Yann E. MORIN <yann.morin.1998@anciens.enib.fr>
1   Cameron Hutchison <lists@xdna.net>
1   Clark Rawlins <clark@bit63.org>
1   Francisco Gonzalez <gzmorell@gmail.com>
1   Francisco Gonzalez Morell <gzmorell@gmail.com>
1   Hans-Christian Egtvedt <hans-christian.egtvedt@atmel.com>
1   Lionel Landwerlin <lionel.landwerlin@openwide.fr>
1   Ormund Williams <ormundw@panix.com>
1   Rob Alley <ralley@NZ-DEV-HW-BS3.nw.local>
1   Sagaert Johan <sagaert.johan@skynet.be>
1   grante <grante@alpha.(none)>

For the next release, we will work on additional cleanup of Buildroot and particularly the target/ directory, which contains the code to build the Linux kernel, different bootloaders, and to generate the final root filesystem image in various formats. Improving support for external toolchains is also on our TODO list : supporting multilib toolchains such as the CodeSoucery toolchain, and fixing a long-standing issue with libtool.

Don’t hesitate to try Buildroot, and to report your successes and failures on the mailing-list, in our bug tracker, or on our IRC channel, #uclibc on Freenode.

LZO kernel compression

2010-03-02T06:15:30+00:00

As Michael stated in his review of the interesting features in Linux 2.6.30, new compression options have been recently added to the kernel. We therefore decided to have a look at those compression methods, from a compression ratio and decompression speed point of view.

This comparison will be based on “self-extractible kernels”, that is, kernel images containing bootstrap code allowing them to extract a compressed image. As underlined in the previous article, this approach is not used on all architectures. Blackfin, notably, chose a different path and compresses the whole kernel image, without including bootstrap code. While this has the clear advantage of making compression much simpler with respect to kernel code, it forces decompression out to the bootloader code.

Each of those methods has its advantages. Indeed, the Blackfin approach relies on the bootloader to provide the necessary functions, so that may be a problem to do things like bypassing u-boot to reduce the boot time. On the other hand, implementing it only once in the bootloader (as architecture-independent code) makes it unnecessary to write the low-level bootstrap code for each architecture in the kernel, which is surely interesting on virtually all architectures, the notable exceptions being x86 and ARM.

Gzip (also known as Zlib or inflate) has been the traditional (and, as a matter of fact, only) method used to compress kernels. Consequently, we’ll use it as the reference in the following tests. Our test environment is as follows:

ARM9 AT91SAM9263 CPU, 200MHz, using the mainline arch/arm/configs/usb-a9263.config

This comparison includes figures for LZO, a new kernel image compression method that I have contributed to the Linux sources, and which hopefully will make its way into the mainline kernel (the patches I implemented are still waiting for review from kernel developers here). LZO support in the kernel is only new for kernel decompression, as it is already used by JFFS2 and UBIFS. LZO is a stream-oriented algorithm, and although its compression ratio is lower than that of gzip, decompression is lightning-fast, as we will soon find out.

So, here are the figures, average on 20 boots with each compression method:

Uncompressed	3.24Mo	-	-	200%
LZO	1.76Mo	0.552s	70%	109%
Gzip	1.62Mo	0.775s	100%	100%
LZMA	1.22Mo	5.011s	646%	75%

Bzip2 has not been tested here: the low-level bootstrap file, head.S, only allocates 64Kb for use by malloc() on ARM. Some quick tests showed that the kernel would not extract with less than 3.5Mib of malloc() space. That would require to modify head.S so that malloc can use more memory, which we will not do here. However, given that enough memory is usable on the system, one could well use bzip2. All the other algorithms performed the extraction using the standard 64Kib malloc space.

From the results, we can clearly see that LZMA is nearly unsuitable for our system, and should be considered only if the space constraints for storing the kernel are so tight that we can’t afford to use more space that was is strictly necessary.

LZO looks like a good candidate when it comes to speeding up the boot process, at the expense of some (almost neglectable) extra space. Gzip is close to LZO when it comes to size, although extraction is not as fast. That means that unless you’re hitting corner cases, like only having enough space for a Gzip compressed image but not for one made with LZO, choosing the latter is probably a safe bet.

Besides, the LZO-compressed kernel size is about 54% the size of the uncompressed kernel. As the kernel load time varies linearly with its size, load time for an uncompressed kernel doubles. While 0.55s are won because there’s no need to run a decompression algorithm, you spend twice as much time loading the kernel. This time is not negligible at all compared to the decompression time. Indeed, loading the uncompressed image takes roughly 0.8s. That means that at the cost of slowing down the boot process by 0.15s (compared to an uncompressed kernel), one gets a kernel image which is roughly twice as small. Rather nice, isn’t it?

NYC meetup?

2010-03-01T22:07:21+00:00

Massimo, David, Tom, Gianluca and David are meeting up in New York City in mid-March, and we want to see you. We’re planning a get-together on March 20 with folks from the Arduino community. We hope to have a daytime meet-up to see each other’s work, trade tips on Arduino and talk about 1.0, and an evening of drinks somewhere as well.

In order to do that, we need a head count so we can pick a place. If you’re interested and can make it that day, email team@arduino.cc. When we have a general idea of how many people can make it, we’ll post a place and some details.

Detach subdirectory into separate Git repository

2010-03-01T15:28:01+00:00

usbboot is subdirectory in xburst-tools. here is the step to separate usbboot to an individual Git repository:

<> git clone –no-hardlinks git://projects.qi-hardware.com/xburst-tools.git xburst-tools.tmp
<> cd xburst-tools.tmp/
<> git filter-branch –subdirectory-filter usbboot HEAD
<> git reset –hard
<> git gc –aggressive
<> git prune

The following command will remove [usbboot] from within [xburst-tools].

git filter-branch --tree-filter "rm -rf usbboot" --prune-empty HEAD
git reset --hard
git gc --aggressive
git prune

Of course, test it in a ‘clone –no-hardlinks’ repository first, and follow it with the reset, gc and prune commands Paul lists.

for more information :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/359424/detach-subdirectory-into-separate-git-repository

Diskussion

2010-03-01T07:42:19+00:00

Looking for documentation on sunplus SPMA100B

2010-03-01T01:00:00+00:00

In the Motorola/Compal C155 phone supported by OsmocomBB, we have found a ringtone melody chip called SPMA100B from sunplus.

As strange as it might seem, this is the only part used in the phone for which we have not been able to find any kind of programming information. So if you know anything about how to program this part from software (register map, programming manual, ...) please let me know!

And no, we don't need electrical/mechanical data sheets, thanks :)

Travelling season

2010-02-26T14:29:05+00:00

Hey,

traveling season has begun and so I wanted to give a first review as well as a look ahead on things to come.

My first destination, in a row of short trips, is Paris. After a long Bus ride (don’t ask) from Berlin to Paris I got here and was welcomed with sunshine and good coffee.

During my stay which will probably end tomorrow (wednesday at 7pm) I plan to visit Bearstech and talk to local SHR developers. If you are in the area and want to see a Ben NanoNote and talk about paroli get in touch with me :)

Update: As I didn’t blog earlier meeting me will be difficult, but as you’ll see further down I will be back in Paris soon :) I can also update on the Ben NanoNote situation. We managed to flash a device here and it was rather easy and smooth. I expected the flashing to be more unstable, but I was positively surprised. A big thanks to Julien who did the actual flashing part :)

What would such a message be without proof? So here we go!

Here for non-flash download.

The next stop on the tour will be Berlin at the Atoms&Bits Camp from Sept. 26th to 27th. I will attend as many sessions as possible and of course carry a Ben NanoNote at all times :)

Next up is Paris again. I will be attending the Open World Forum from October 1st to October 2nd.

For now the rest of October seems quiet. On the second weekend in November FSCONS ‘09 takes place. I will give a talk on Copyleft hardware.

A trip to Basel concludes the current planning with the OpenZim developer meeting on November 20th – 22nd.

If you are in any of these areas and wanna organize a local meet-up outside of the mentioned events just let me know.

Any other events that you know of that might be worth attending?

Pictures will follow.

/mirko

Mashup – Sept. 23

2010-02-26T14:28:56+00:00

Hey,

a lot of things have happened over the past few days. I wanted to touch on a view points here for those who are not subscribed to our mailinglist [1], yet .

First some small technicals, Mirko, together with the rest of the software team, reported progress in several areas:

[snip]
USB-Ethernet-Gadget is working.
You’re now able to speak ethernet, and therefore IP, to your Ben
Nanonote via USB.
That’s really cool, because now all the network-stuff can be used which
simplifies lots of things (e.g. SSH into the NanoNote, copying files,
etc.)

Lars found out the used NAND-chip is a multilevel-chip that has to be
treated by the flash-tools in a special way which should fix most of our
previous ECC-NAND-chip-problems.

OpenZIM, an opensource implementation for handling ZIM-files which
mainly provide wiki-articles (e.g. the wikipedia), it’s dependencies and
lynx as first webbrowser are ported to OpenWrt! This way the Ben
NanoNote can be used as offline wikipedia reader.
All of them need some more cleanups but will be committed soon.
Unfortunately the amount of RAM (32MB) of the Ben limits applications
like OpenZIM, so they’ll need some more tweaking to get them running
smoothly.

Thanks to Lars and Xiang Fu Sound (based on ALSA) and keyboard are now
supported, also work is going on to get the battery driver cleaned up /
improved (thanks to JieJing Zhang).

In addition there’s now a driver for the internally used real time clock
- also written by lars.

[/snip]

Wolfgang worked with Ingenic (the SoC manufacturer) and made amazing progress:

[snip]

good news for all Ingenic hackers: Ingenic agreed to install a little
rsync box behind their firewall that will rsync their ongoing Linux
and u-boot development svn repositories to our public server.
What that means is that any updates they do on the 2.6.24.3 or 2.6.27
Linux tree, as well as u-boot (old 1.1.6 version) and usbboot, will
become public the next day :-)

You can find the 4 new projects at http://projects.qi-hardware.com

ingenic-tools-usb-boot
ingenic-linux-01boot-u-boot-1-1-6
ingenic-linux-02os-linux-2-6-24-3
ingenic-linux-02os-linux-2-6-27

[/snip]

Atoms&Bits

Yesterday the first event (for me at least) in the Atoms&Bits Festival took place.

It was a reading of Cory Doctorow’s Makers. A very interesting meet-up of people from various parts of the Open Everything movement. The event will continue on Saturday for me. I will be around the event location, presenting the Ben NanoNote and the Qi philosophy. So if you have the chance, join us!

Design

We finalized the design of the device. Finally. Many tweaks here and there. Most importantly, the files are uploaded to our downloads directory[2] and of course are all released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license[3].

There is more news in the making and things will move quickly over the next few days, so stay tuned.

/mirko

[1] http://lists.qi-hardware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/developer

[2] http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/hardware/design/

[3] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Breizh Entropy Congress: less than two weeks before deadline!

2010-02-26T12:33:10+00:00

You have until March 10th to send us a few words on the projects or the subject that you would like to present at Breizh Entropy Congress (Rennes, France, April 15-17 2010). After your submission, we will contact you before March 20th to tell you if it is going to be part of the schedule. The schedule with the timetable will be published on March 25th.

ANYONE can submit a proposal to Breizh Entropy Congress: students, entrepreneurs, enthusiasts, artists… on ANY subject related to free and open technologies. This congress is about eclecticism!

To participate, send a mail to cfp@breizh-entropy.org including the following points:
- Format of the submission: lecture, workshop, installation, lightning talk, other…
- Title of the submission
- Name of speaker(s)/presenter(s)/artist(s)
- Language (if applicable): French/English
- Summary of the submission
- Short bio of the speaker
- Hardware/logistics requirements
- Contact e-mail and (if possible) mobile phone

The complete call for proposals is online.

Looking forward to your participation!
And we are grateful for any kind of distribution of this info!

How Open Learning Exchange Nepal is Changing Lives

2010-02-26T12:27:46+00:00

Wow! Watching this video from OLE Nepal I am so happy for them and sad for One Laptop Per Child. The success of OLE and the failures of OLPC are so self-evident:

See how OLE Nepal is focused on empowering the teachers? Hear how they're working with the established educational system? That's the path to XO laptop success - using technology as an enabler of educator evolution, not a bludgeon to force change.

Better yet, did you see the shoutout to the Teachermate? Yeah, OLE is the real education project.

Active discussions

2010-02-26T11:32:44+00:00

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Qt is working on OpenWrt

2010-02-26T00:14:30+00:00

Okay, now some - really little - text I promised…

As you can I see Qt is running inside OpenWrt on the Ben NanoNote of qi-hardware. The device has only 32MB of RAM so this - especially this video I made (qt_openwrt_nanonote.ogm) with it’s coverflow-like 3d and mirroring-effects - shows the great potential of even such embedded hardware.

The Qt packages are not yet committed, I’ll do some cleanups and testing before.

However it’s almost ready to get its way into the OpenWrt packages repository.

OpenCL Calculation and Reduction

2010-02-25T22:13:25+00:00

Otherwise known as "calculating a long list of numbers then adding them all up". For a GPGPU (OpenCL) simulation program at work, I needed to calculate around 160 numbers which would be averaged to produce one result for storage in a 1024x1024 element array. That's 160 numbers for each of 1024x1024 pixels, which would be a lot to store as an intermediate result for a later step of averaging on the GPU, or (heaven forbid) to be copied back to system memory.

The magic word to search for in tackling this is reduction, and there's plenty of hardcore compsci knowledge about how to make it go as fast as possible in a parallel environment. But, basically the trick is to have 160x1024x1024 threads operate in groups of 160 (one group for each of the 1024x1024 overall elements). Threads cooperating like this can share memory, and each thread writes its individual value to an array in that local memory. Then, one of the 160 threads adds up all the values and does a single write of the final average value to the global array. For the kernel to test if it's running the "chosen thread" is as simple as something like this:

if ( get_local_id(0) == 0 )

The only bit of "funny business" is that each of the 160 threads has to have finished calculating before the results can be added. That's done with this statement, which guarantees that all previous local memory writes have completed for all threads:

barrier(CLK_LOCAL_MEM_FENCE);

This is a really simple example: for one thread to do all of the averaging is a waste of resources when the reduction itself could be parallelised. In that case, one thread would (say) add up values 0-79 while another added up 80-159, then one of those threads would (after another barrier) add up the remaining two values. It's easy to see how it can be broken down more and more, and there are variations which make better use of the GPU resources, avoid memory conflicts, and so on.

So, if you'd ever heard of the thread groups and local memory used in OpenCL (also CUDA) and wondered what they were good for, now you know..

NVidia's OpenCL Programming Guide has a lot of discussion of this topic, and there's loads more to be found around the web.

OpenStreetMap's Role in Haiti

2010-02-25T20:25:20+00:00

This is very cool. Volunteer contributors used satellite imagery, which was made available especially, to create detailed maps of Haiti which the aid workers used to help find their way.

Qi Hardware Novedades semanales 7 and 8/2010

2010-02-25T07:58:39+00:00

(Traduccion del original en ingles)
Desde la lista de desarrollo Qi Hardware Development List Wolfgang Spraul nos dice:
Hola,
(David: Lo publicaré en la lista de debate también la próxima vez)
la novedad mas importante primero:
---1 Ben NanoNote listos para enviar!

Qi Hardware Weekly Update 7 and 8/2010

2010-02-25T01:03:22+00:00

From the Qi Hardware Development List Wolfgang Spraul says:
Hi,
(David: I will post to discussion as well in the future)
the most important update first:
---1 Ben NanoNote shipping!

Muss kurz afk.

2010-02-24T22:37:25+00:00

OpenBench Logic Sniffer (formerly Sump Pump) is available for Pre-order at a cost of $45 including worldwide shipping.

2010-02-24T14:55:27+00:00

The Sump Pump project has been renamed to its new production name: OpenBench Logic Sniffer. The hardware is testing out very well, the User Guide is just about finished, and Seeed Studio is taking Pre-orders. The hardware price is $45 dollars which includes worldwide shipping! Visit the OpenBench Logic Sniffer project page for the latest information.

Critical Success Factors in OLPC Afghanistan Deployment

2010-02-24T14:36:03+00:00

Our goal here is to dramatically and quickly improve educational outcomes. Unfortunately that process doesn't happen magically by itself. There's a myriad of cultural and reality on the ground matters that need to be taken care of. We need to understand concretely the problem we are attempting to solve and how our intervention is going to lead to solving it.

Empowering girls' education

So the reality on the ground in most Afghan schools here is that students and teachers really don't have enough time in class. Typically 30 mins for lessons that they would really need one hour for. Teachers often have to find additional hours to do other jobs to make ends meet.

Going back to that lack of time, sometimes capacity difficulties, they often can't provide feedback to student work, homework, etc. Without feedback, hints, etc. which parents and teachers can't provide learning results naturally suffer. Finally against this backdrop providing opportunities for group work / soft skills is tricky to say the least.

Creating a blended learning experience can effectively increase the amount of time that children have for learning. Identify which parts can be engaging self study through mini games, video, audio and quizzes. Provide self test reasonably framed not as tempting as flipping the book pages quizzes with hints and feedback on incorrect answers to provide the feedback to learning that children need. We can then use some of that freed time to construct a window for projects and further learning. But to get there we have to round off all the corners and engage all stakeholders.

XO digital library index in Afghanistan

This is what we're engaging now with three subjects: Science, Maths and Religious Studies. Creating complete interactive text books with the interactive tools (gathered from Java sites, scratch, Karma, what we developed) built through ExeLearning so that they can run offline anywhere anytime (we're coding some improvements to add Scratch, Iframe, and HTML 5 support).

In Afghanistan we are fortunate that there is a strong cultural emphasis placed on learning, and great respect for teachers in society, based on Islamic values and the importance the Koran places upon learning and education. On the other hand it means that we need to remember the position of the teacher cannot be undermined, and we need to deal with things like what to do when the kids ask questions that the teacher doesn't know the answer to.

Whatever pedagogical model might be applied; in most cultures, and particularly in cultures such as S. Asia where teacher prestige is vital, the most important bottom line critical success factor is teacher confidence. If the teachers are confident with the new technology, then results will flow, if not, we're asking for disaster. No - explaining binary code does not really have a practical use day to day for the XO laptop. But it did improve teacher confidence.

We did that in a number of ways. In addition to the normal teacher training (5-6 days) we also identified champion teachers who were more enthusiastic (Roughly 3 out of 10 teachers). We then did another 5-6 days with them. They then become the go to people in the school. Then find a local computer science student or such and have them visit. Even if computer science possibly is not the most relevant subject in the process, it is the part that addresses insecurities more often than not, and it creates a social web of go to people, which is the same way that other challenges are typically solved here.

We need to remember that connectivity ain't cheap. Not at all - satellite bandwidth is extremely expensive. Typically satellite based dedicated bandwidth runs at about $3,000/month for 1 Mbps. Which is why we base pretty much everything on using the local school server and we run our own digital library (built using our own Simple Digital Library Index). We copy those websites (like wikipedia snapshots, language websites, health contents, etc) that we want for reference onto the school network using mirroring tools. Also avoids any cultural sensitivity problems.

Finally we need to consider that we're still learning. So we need to rigorously assess what we're doing, we need to engage stakeholders, we need to get their feedback, run ideas by them, engage teachers, children and parents in the whole process. We find a very positive reception from children (of course), teachers, and just a few percent of parents complaining that their children were a bit too interested in their XO. We found around a 22% increase in standardized testing results over 2.5 months after introducing the laptops. We have indications. Soon it will be time to find more definitive answers.

The XO thus can be the key to unlocking amazing possibilities and improving education, but to realize the potential of the investment and achieve our objective of massively improving learning outcomes we have to work with the culture, with stakeholders, and deliver without the need for massive recurring bandwidth costs the educational content that children and teachers need.

Keep up with OLPC Afghanistan - subscribe to OLPC News via RSS Feed, Email or Twitter

What's to expect

2010-02-24T13:30:53+00:00

Chinese New Year holidays are over - work has begun at the factory!

We are in daily contact with them, so here is a brief roadmap of what should happen when:

At the moment, the machines are maintained, cleaned and prepared to go into normal production run again. Production will start during the next days, probably on Monday. Then lots of Pandora cases should be spit out each day :)
While they do this, we try to make them another Silkscreen sample and send us a picture of it (not the whole sample) within this week. If it's fine, we'll use the silkscreen - if not, we'll just go with plain cases, to not waste anymore time.

As for the OS, the devs are really working hard on it right now (despite not having time, as they have so much things to do in real life).
It will surely not be the most polished OS ever released yet, but if you want a polished OS, go get an Apple (and miss all the fun we'll all have by enhancing the Pandora OS together!)

So, what can you expect, what will not work, where are tweaks needed?

What does work:

The desktop fully works. It's like a normal PC desktop. You have your file manager, your windows, your apps, etc.
PND system is working. You can simply copy games onto your SD Card, put it into your Pandora - and PLAY!
Apps: Installed apps do work fine so far. That includes Midori, Abiword, Orage, Pidgin, XChat, etc.
Audio Playing: XMMS working fine.
Movie Playing: Working... but has some issues (see below)
USB Devices: You can connect USB Sticks, harddisks, mice, keyboard, etc. Normal things run out of the box.
TV Out: The TV Out cable works fine, SVHS only for the moment though (see below)
Power Saving Mode: Yep, it's included and does work. At the moment, it should last for about 50 hours, not too long, but there might be a lot more components which could be switched off to save more power. Good enough to leave your Pandora lying around for a few hours without having to reboot it.
LED Warning (Blinking) on low battery with automatic shutdown when the battery status becomes critical.
Keyboard, us nub as mouse, touchscreen, everything working.

What issues are there?

The biggest issue: WiFi is still work in progress. The driver works, without using SDIO it was slow, DJWillis is working on it, but it's time consuming. It MIGHT be ready when the Pandora ships, but it might be WiFi will still take a bit longer. Maybe some devs want to help out here once they get a Pandora in their hands :)
There's no software audio mixer yet. This means you can only use the volume wheel. No big deal if you're just listening to music or playing games, but multiple sounds at once will not work yet. Also, the equalizer isn't yet working.
Some apps have to be optimized for the small screen: Fullscreen apps like Midori, Abiword, etc. do look fine. Some stuff however (XFCE4 Settings, etc.) are using windows bigger than 800x480. They are completely usable, but you have to move the windows around to access all buttons.
Movieplayer: While basic movie playing works, it does not use any hardware accelerations yet. DVD Quality xvid videos do play fine, but H264 is too much without hardware acceleration. Also, in windowed mode the videos are playing before the menus. Watching movies in fullscreen mode works nicely. Things should be way better when hardware support is included :)
There is a lot to tweak and optimize here and there. Bootup speed can be increased, more themes (fingerfriendly ones?) could be created, some minor issues like the normal logout of Ubuntu-Netbook-Launcher doesn't work (you need to use a menu entry), etc. Nothing serious that makes the unit not usable, but there are a lot of things that can be improved within the next months!

So, except for WiFi, all things do work well so far but can be optimized a lot.
Please don't expect to have perfectly working games and emulators on day 1 - adopting to a new system will take some time and except for some core OS developers, nobody has a Pandora yet. Once delivered, games should start to pop up and become optimized pretty fast!

Some of that stuff might be fixed until first release - let's hope for WiFi! :)

Another quick note on updating the system:

When things work fine, we're going to setup our own repository server for firmware updates. You can then easily do a system update with the Pandora. The packages we use will be tested so that they shouldn't break anything :)
In the beginning, the updates will be full flash updates, until the basic system will be completely stable. Then we'll setup the repository server (which basically means: when WiFi is working).

Everyone who wants to help us can do so. There will be a bugtracker for reporting any issues. The complete system is already available via GIT to all devs, so patches and bugfixes can basically be sent to us by everyone :)
The first few months with the new OS will be pretty exciting! I've seen how well our handful of devs have been able to get the system working so well, it will fly away when a lot more devs are helping out!

learning french … again.

2010-02-23T22:05:25+00:00

Da sich ja vermehrt über mein Deutsch und Englisch aufgeregt wurde, gibts die Pointen ab sofort nur noch in französisch. So kann ich nebenbei gleich die Hausaufgaben für den VHS Kurs machen…

compile openwrt error need libxml-simple-perl in ubuntu

2010-02-23T17:36:19+00:00

今天试着从头开始编译　OPENWRT NANONTOE 的镜像。出现了一个错误。

在编译 icon-naming-utils 时需要 libxml-simple-perl 包。

记下来。备用

Arduino 1.0 Usage Survey

2010-02-23T13:35:10+00:00

On January 1st, we announced that we’re working towards Arduino 1.0 (for details, see this post). Our goal is to stabilize the platform so that it’s supportable and a good foundation for future developments.

We’ve been getting good feedback from experienced developers through our developers list; from many users individually, both in person and in email; and in the Arduino forums. We want to make sure we get input from the whole Arduino community. This means we want to hear from users, teachers, designers, developers, tinkerers, distributors, and anyone else who uses Arduino. This means you.

There are a few ways you can let us know what you think:

* Please fill out the the Arduino Uno Punto Zero survey to let us know what you think of the current features of Arduino. It takes about five minutes. Even if you have nothing else to add, this will help give us a broad picture of Arduino use. Please share this widely with your friends, students, and anyone else you know who uses Arduino.

For those who want to discuss in more depth, there are a few venues:

A special mailing list, uno@arduino.cc, is open for general discussion. If you’re not sure where you fit in, but have something to share, jump in here and we’ll direct the conversation in the right directions.
The developers mailing list is open for those interested in the programming and hardware details of Arduino’s development
The teachers mailing list is open for teachers using Arduino, whether you’re a developer or not. We’re particularly interested in hearing from teachers who are using Arduino to teach things other than electronics.
The Arduino Uno Punto Zero topic in the Arduino forum is open for discussion, for those of you who are already regular forum contributors.
Finally, the Arduino development issues list is available online. If you have things to add that aren’t already on this list, feel free to add it. This isn’t a discussion list, it’s a to-do list of specific tasks to get done for each version of the hardware, software, and IDE.

Your feedback will help make Arduino 1.0 a solid foundation to build on. Thanks much.

Metro Teknik, Sweden

2010-02-23T11:05:03+00:00

Metro Teknik 2010-02-17, cover, scanned by Mange

I thought the guys from Wired made me us look like crazy dudes in the pictures they took of us last year … but that photographer did a nice job compared to the photoshoped version of me coming out on this week’s Metro Teknik, the free paper about technology. The paper is featuring Arduino, and they took a couple of pictures here at my lab at K3. I am glad someone cares about our story and puts it into everyday people’s hands. The article is written in a language that is easy to understand and looks for examples of people working with Arduino at different levels. You can even see a how-to guide around the IDE … not bad at all … if it wasn’t for those pictures that make me look like the guy with the craziest hair-dude in the universe.

Metro Teknik 20100217, article, scanned by Mange

NanoNote 中的输入法（SCIM）

2010-02-23T03:48:48+00:00

这几天在试着在NANONOTE中使用SCIM。编译是成功了。但不是运行了。没有效果。

－－

root@BenNanoNote:~# scim
Smart Common Input Method 1.4.7

Launching a SCIM process with socket…
Loading simple Config module …
Creating backend …
Loading socket FrontEnd module …
Starting SCIM …

－－

之后就没反应了。“CTRL ＋ SPACE“ 也没有反应！：（

Ben Nanonote launched

2010-02-22T21:55:42+00:00

The Qi Hardware community launched the Ben Nanonote, a little “hackable” laptop/PDA-like gizmo with open schematics and software. You can order now.

Nanonote

Specifications:

336 MHz XBurst Jz4720 MIPS-compatible CPU
display: 3.0” color TFT
resolution: 320 x 240, 16.7M color
dimension (mm): 99 x 75 x 17.5 (lid closed)
weight: 126 g (incl. battery)
DRAM: 32MB Synchronous DRAM
headphone jack (3.5 mm)
SDHC microSD
850mAh Li-ion battery
2GB NAND flash memory
mini-USB: USB 2.0 High-Speed Device
speaker and microphone

Qi Hardware will also be producing Milkymist One boards, with an FPGA implementing the free SoC. Stay tuned…

QT/KDE on OpenWrt

2010-02-21T21:28:52+00:00

As you may know OpenWrt’s collection of ported packages is continuesly growing.

Many graphical stuff gets ported, as well as graphical desktops and toolkits (lxde, xfce, gnome based on GTK2 - e17 based on the enlightenment foundation libraries - etc.).

However there was no approach yet to port the last missing Desktop “KDE” and underlying Toolkit “QT”.

That’s why I went to “Tokamak 4″ this weekend, a meeting organized and founded by the KDE foundation, intended to communicate and hack together related to several KDE software projects.

We were about 25 people from all over the world and I really enjoyed the stay and nice, friendly and mixed party - surprisingly I was the only one not using KDE (however not for a special reason - just got used to my current environment) :).

They showed lot’s of interest in the UCI-System (Unified Configuration Interface) OpenWrt is using.
It’s a simple, human-readable, easy-to-parse configuration file format and library OpenWrt uses for services to make it easy writing Administration Interfaces for them (e.g. the webinterface “LuCI”).
We were spinning around about KDE Plasma applets which will list available OpenWrt-devices ready to get administrated right through native applications.

Key deal for me however was to get in touch with people who know the QT/KDE architecture very well, for sure promoting a bit OpenWrt, qi-hardware and it’s concept of open hardware and why I think having QT/KDE support within OpenWrt is opening lot’s of opportunities for both projects.

Since QT is able to use DirectFB (a very powerful but light abstraction for the linux framebuffer) - and therefore does not require a X11 system necessarily - it would be also great for limited hardware such as the Ben NanoNote (32MB of RAM) where I got GTK2-based apps running on top of DirectFB quite some time ago.

I expected to get basic support for QT within OpenWrt done this weekend, however I underestimated the size and complexity of QT - never touched QT-code before.
I realized QT is not just a toolkit as GTK2 is, but a whole framework which tries to abstract as much as possible from the underlying system. It features own backends for multimedia, sound, graphics, even networking - to achieve a stable API and platform compatibility without the need of code modifications, no matter which backends or systems are used below.

In which way the typical issues of such a abstraction-concept - such as getting bloated, having performance issues, being feature-limited as you’re usually just able to support the least common denominator of all supported backends, etc. - I’ve no idea yet - maybe they found a way, will find that out sooner or later.

They also use “qmake” as build-system which is structured quite different than e.g. GNU make, so this got another temporary road blocker as I used qmake never before and had to dig in first.

Back to the port of QT to OpenWrt: I’m having promise to see the first basic QT based application running on a OpenWrt supported device within the next days.

Will let you know

Restructuring OpenBSC and OsmocomBB code

2010-02-20T01:00:00+00:00

I've spent the better part of the day with , renaming files/functions/include paths, Makefiles, autotools and the like.

The result of this is a new sub-project called libosmocore that gathers all the shared code between the network-side GSM implementation OpenBSC and the phone-side implementation OsmocomBB. The library is portable enough that it can run on a proper OS (like GNU/Linux) but also be cross-compiled to work on the actual phone without any OS.

On the other hand we now have a master Makefile in OsmocomBB to build libosmocore for host PC and target (phone), as well as the osmocon and layer2 host programs and the phone firmware itself.

Let's hope I can now return to writing actual code...

Smoke testing the Mesh-Potato video – Part II

2010-02-19T18:00:58+00:00

We have now a new over-voltage protection circuit design for the mass production Mesh-Potatos. We were not satisfied with the previous version. Ideally the over-voltage protection circuit has a snap-on characteristic that triggers the fuse and interrupts the supply voltage without a grey zone. The new circuit triggers at 43 Volts and acts as a powerful crowbar circuit. I have connected the prototype of this circuit to a Mesh-Potato and went through the robustness tests according to our test plan. You can find the test plan and the schematic in the svn respository. A little video at Vimeo.com is documenting some of the tests – thanks to Katrin Lang, who acted as editor and camera operator this time.

Mesh-Potato smoke testing with 230 Volt AC from Elektra Berlin on Vimeo.

The list of tests included a reverse DC voltage test from a unfused 36 Volt source (consisting of three powerful 12 V lead acid batteries in series), excessive DC voltage tests and finally a really scary test involving 230 Volt AC (330 Volt peak) from mains. Please don’t try this at home. Even if the Mesh-Potato survives, there is a 50% chance that you might have mains potential on ground of all components connected to the MP. Also don’t try this with your alpha or beta series Mesh-Potatos, because the previous over-voltage protection circuit is not up to that challenge.

Technically inexperienced people can easily make mistakes, so our idea was to design the Mesh-Potato as robust as possible. In 2005 I was helping to set up a large scale WLAN network in the Sylhet area in Bangladesh. The network consisted of high towers (up to 100 feet tall) and strong directional antennas, interconnecting towns and a school with wireless long shots (up to 32km). One of the trainees damaged a important wireless relay on a tower by taking the open ends of a 12 Volt cable and plugging it straight into the mains socket. Of course the equipment (a Mesh-Cube from 4G Systems) subsequently looked like a lightning strike had hit it, which was actually what I supposed first. However there had been no thunderstorm in the night before. It took me a while to find the reason. The trainee either hadn’t realized what he had done, or he didn’t want to admit it. He watched me trying to find the problem without saying anything. It is common practice in Bangladesh to plug cables into sockets without plugs. The quality of sockets and plugs is miserable, so loose contacts are the rule, not the exception. Now a important relay was down and it was hard to get a replacement. The problem wasn’t so much the financial loss. Shipping and particularly customs can take weeks in Bangladesh. So during the first Villagetelco workshop I suggested to design the MP as robust as possible.

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Forum: 20.000 users cannot be wrong

2010-02-19T16:57:02+00:00

over 20.000 registered users on the Arduino Forum

Winter? Ha!

2010-02-19T15:39:24+00:00

For being a Spaniard, this -my 10th- winter in Sweden is going to be hard to forget. It has been snowing like never before, I had to start wearing two pairs of socks, stopped having sugar in the coffee because of how much I would drink by the end of the day, couldn’t ride my bike to work for weeks …

Rumor says Linus Torvalds wrote his first Kernel during a very cold winter in Finland, making an analogy, we have spent quite a lot of time troubleshooting the website getting things done slowly, in the shadow. Some changes are more popular than others (I know some of you are not liking the forum’s layout) but we are not done yet. We need your comments to work this out. Jokes about how things look like are good, but much better is constructive criticism and proposals on how to make things better. thanks to all of you contributing in one way or the other.

We have a new collaborator -Davide Gomba- dedicated to clean up the spam and to try things out in the forum, among many other things. He has been with us for more than a week speeding up some of the very annoying tasks when running a website like Arduino’s. Please welcome him to our small family of prototypers, you will meet him often.

Talking about speed, seems like the last two days things have gone slow in the server during US time. You should know we are monitoring this, it is something we haven’t seen before and we have our service provider -ServInt- looking at it together with us. We hope to have it solved during the weekend. If the error shows up today again, it should be quite simple to debug it. If not … we’ll have to wait until the next time it happens.

There are some other news:

* we included the service addthis for you to add any of the Arduino URLs to your favourite Social Network like Twitter, Facebook, you say it … there are over 200 different services within addthis

* we created friendly error messages for the site. Now if the server times out, you won’t get the white page any longer. It is not as cute as at some other websites, but we featured one of the oldest Arduino boards I could find in my drawer as the official “things are getting slow” picture

* the blog’s twitter module has been updated to the latest version, now it links won’t break the layout any longer, just look at the sidebar on the right

* the forum’s layout is being reworked, please be patient with us, we are going to make it easy to read

* in parallel and thanks to a very friendly French user (X. Hinault) we are going to prepare the new reference in French, I will be porting it to the official arduino.cc/fr soon.

And now, back to the hot pot of coffee.

Introducing the Butterfly One, a streamlined FPGA dev board with a target price of $40-$50.

2010-02-19T11:51:28+00:00

The finishing touches are being put on the Butterfly One which is going to become the core offering at Gadget Factory. The Butterfly One is a simplified and streamlined FPGA development kit that will be the platform for REDe (Rapid Electronics Design Environment) development. The Butterfly One has been streamlined for easy manufacturing and an overall lower cost. The targeted sale price for the Butterfly One is $40-$50 dollars.

Announcing OsmocomBB: Free Software / Open Source GSM Baseband firmware

2010-02-19T01:00:00+00:00

Last, but not least, I am proud to announce the OsmocomBB project publicly. During the last 7 weeks, a small group of skilled developers has been working on this

It has now reached a point where we can

scan the spectrum for the strongest signal GSM channels
lock onto them and performing AFC (automatic frequency control)
decode the SCH burst to obtain BSIC and GSM frame time
decode the BCCH of the cell, pass it over to the host PC and feed it into wireshark

Since this in itself is a valuable and useful milestone of the project, it was the ideal opportunity to take this project public.

There's still a lot of work to be done in many areas. Most of them are not even related to the GSM air interface. So if you're familiar with C development on an ARM7TDMI based microcontroller, know your way around I2C and SPI, are familiar with the GNU toolchain for ARM and want to help us out: Please join the baseband-devel mailing list right away!

Milkymist 0.3 release announcement

2010-02-18T13:11:17+00:00

It is with great excitement that I am announcing the release of Milkymist 0.3. This release marks a significant milestone for the project: since now, it’s no longer tens of thousands of lines of code for nerds only. It’s also an actual MilkDrop implementation, rendering good-looking visual effects that EVERYBODY can appreciate.

But, see for yourself. If you have a Xilinx ML401 board, grab your JTAG cable and fetch a binary kit from the usual location. See the wiki for setup instructions. Put on some music, turn on random preset selection, and enjoy!

If you don’t have a ML401, here is a video for you to chew on before the Milkymist One boards are available:

(download MP4 file)

On to the technical change log of this release:

Major TMU redesign (TMU2):
- Improved performance (2-3 times faster)
- Rectangular rendering primitive
- Bilinear texture filtering
- Texture wrapping
- Subpixel texture resolution
- New vertex format
PFPU modified to support the new TMU vertex format
Additional MilkDrop features in the demo firmware:
- More wave modes
- Borders
- Motion vectors (experimental)
- Texture wrapping
- Random preset chooser
- Fine-grained decay

If you want to discuss and keep instantly updated about the project, I encourage you to come and idle in the #milkymist channel on the FreeNode IRC network. See this page.

See you there!

copyleft hardware planet

How did we get there

tarte

how did we get here

First Elphel Eyesis Prototype assembled

The XO Laptop with Handle Almost Removed [Flickr]

XO Laptop Repair Bench at OLPC Learning Club DC Meetup

Now where is that little screw for the XO? [Flickr]

Just snap off the handle guard like this...

Arduino NYC Meetup — Update

Keep it going.

mein erstes Atelier

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Milkymist 0.4 released

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Próximo 13 de Marzo de 2010 Arduino Workshop en Cerdanyola

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See the OLS in action!

forgotten attachment detector

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LZO kernel compression

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Detach subdirectory into separate Git repository

Diskussion

Looking for documentation on sunplus SPMA100B

Travelling season

Mashup – Sept. 23

Breizh Entropy Congress: less than two weeks before deadline!

How Open Learning Exchange Nepal is Changing Lives

Active discussions

Qt is working on OpenWrt

OpenCL Calculation and Reduction

OpenStreetMap's Role in Haiti

Qi Hardware Novedades semanales 7 and 8/2010

最新更新了 淘宝 上的 NANONOTE 商店

Qi Hardware Weekly Update 7 and 8/2010

Muss kurz afk.

OpenBench Logic Sniffer (formerly Sump Pump) is available for Pre-order at a cost of $45 including worldwide shipping.

Critical Success Factors in OLPC Afghanistan Deployment

What's to expect

learning french … again.

compile openwrt error need libxml-simple-perl in ubuntu

Arduino 1.0 Usage Survey

Metro Teknik, Sweden

NanoNote 中的 输入法（SCIM）

Ben Nanonote launched

QT/KDE on OpenWrt

Restructuring OpenBSC and OsmocomBB code

Smoke testing the Mesh-Potato video – Part II

Forum: 20.000 users cannot be wrong

Winter? Ha!

Introducing the Butterfly One, a streamlined FPGA dev board with a target price of $40-$50.

Announcing OsmocomBB: Free Software / Open Source GSM Baseband firmware

Milkymist 0.3 release announcement

最新更新了淘宝上的 NANONOTE 商店

NanoNote 中的输入法（SCIM）