Community news 2011-03-01

• Over at our Osmocom GSM friends, Marcin Mielczarczyk gave a status update on his effort to run Linux on a MTK 6235 smartphone, including Youtube video to show Angstrom/OPIE running on the phone. The big task of actual GSM baseband action is still missing, but I think this is one of the most promising approaches towards a free phone.

Angstrom/OPIE booting on MTK 6235 phone

• David from Tuxbrain posted his impressions from attending FOSDEM 2011 in Bruxelles.

David in Bruxelles, with NanoNotes, Milkymist One, and other gear.

Milkymist

• Kristian Paul hacked Lua onto his Milkymist One (more about Lua on Wikipedia).

• Kristian Paul took copyleft hardware principles to heart, and had a case made for his Milkymist One locally in Colombia, using the same CAD files as the original cases from Raumfahrtagentur.

Bogota made Milkymist One case (10 USD for the case, 5 USD shipping to Kristian Paul in Buga)

• Sharism is now selling full Milkymist One sets including case for 499 USD plus shipping.
• Yanjun Luo fixed a USB high-speed bug that slipped into the first jtag-serial daughterboard run. Existing stock was reworked by Adam, and bad boards in the field will be replaced (the bug was known before but a decision was made to go ahead because even with the bug, the boards work fine in still fast USB full-speed mode). [1]
• Many bug fixes and improvements, such as a hardware fix for an FPGA bootup configuration problem [2], RTEMS Ethernet driver fixes, added mouse-wheel support in Flickernoise and PDF-based help system.

NanoNote

• Jane sent a Valentine's Ascii art gift, and continued with her case collection. (Valentineqi.ae)

Jane's NanoNote case group hug

• Irina Bushmeleva joined Jane's crochet case production. [3]

Ben	and his wife.

• Nick Montfort released Curveship 0.5, an interactive fiction system, and immediately ported it to his Ben NanoNote. (Curveship sources)

Curveship on NanoNote

• Thanks to David, kyak and others, new ports to Ben NanoNote's OpenWrt image were finished: Emacs, MPlayer, Brainless, flite, pyclock, supertux, sokoban, qball and more... (Full Applications List).
• Xiangfu released a new stable OpenWrt image, 2011-02-23 (Announcement, Changelog, Applications List).

OpenWrt on Ben NanoNote

Xiangfu Liu trying to convert rms (old picture)

• David from Tuxbrain collected all information about Werner's Universal Breakout Board (UBB) on a wiki page, and then announced taking preorders for the UBB (Announcement, UBB wiki page, Tuxbrain shop).

• Mirko Vogt did a hardware and software hack to control RF power sockets from a Ben NanoNote with the help of a HopeRF ISM module. (Mirko's blog post, hackaday.com article)

NanoNote talking to remote switchable power sockets via HopeRF module.