User:Wolfgang Spraul

You can reach me via email and Jabber at wolfgang@sharism.cc.

Qi Hardware - community news, press releases, interviews, editorials.

Qi Community News 2011-04-04

Copying is an act of love. Please copy & share.
Mimi and Eunice by Nina Paley

• Over at Osmocom, Marcin Mielczarczyk posted an update about getting the MTK 6140 GSM/EDGE RF transceiver to work for the free OsmocomBB GSM stack. Read on about solid progress and good links, and join if you can... [1]
• Bitcoins: We've had discussions and discoveries about paying for copyleft hardware with Bitcoins, a digital currency created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. Read an EFF commentary about Bitcoins. (Bitcoin on Wikipedia)
• Sharing spectrum: In order to connect potentially related projects, it's worth mentioning that the IETF recently started a mailing list to define a protocol for access to a white space database. The aim is to make unused or underused spectrum available on an ad-hoc basis, rather than preallocating large chunks of spectrum to the few nation-sized companies that are currently controlling access to our mobile Internet. Read more and join the paws mailing list at [2].

Milkymist

• Yann Sionneau made a presentation of Milkymist at OSHUG #8 in London, March 10. (PDF slides, TeX for remixing)

Yann Sionneau talking about Milkymist One at OSHUG #8, London, March 10

• Jon Phillips put his Milkymist One to good use at the Mozilla Firefox 4 release party in Beijing, China. [3]

Milkymist One making people happy at Firefox 4 release party in Beijing, March 23

• Jon Phillips proposed a change of the Milkymist One case color to transparent light-blue. He did an ad-hoc Starbucks survey and people at 3 different tables were all in favor of transparent light-blue over the violet that we used for most cases so far. There were no objections from Sebastien and others so it seems that's a go.

Transparent light-blue - the case color for Milkymist One RC3 (acrylic panel on right side removed for JTAG).

• We are thinking about including a simple video camera as an accessory for Milkymist One, our current favorite is the OBK-2010CW with a 1/3' ' Sony CCD sensor, 0.5 Lux usable illumination, 3.6 mm M12 lens, weatherproof metal case (bullet style), standard 1/4' ' 20 tpi tripod threading. The decision is not final yet, we will do more comparisons and see what works well with Milkymist One. Also see Kristian Paul's camera comparison.

OBK-2010CW (actual camera case is about 8 cm long, 2 cm diameter)

• Sebastien Bourdeauducq added visual patches for live video transformation [4].
• Sebastien designed a new Flickernoise color theme.

New Milkymist One color theme

PDF viewer

• Sebastien updated his thorough 6-page technical introduction to the Milkymist project. pdf
• Xiangfu Liu wrote Makefiles for automatic compilation of the Milkymist One toolchain, RTEMS and Flickernoise, and added a screenshot feature fbgrab.

Xiangfu Liu running Milkymist One [1:23 min, 9.1 MB]

• Michael Walle started working on a GDB based debug system using the serial link alone instead of OpenOCD. [5]

NanoNote

• Jane Andreas created another Aewan ascii comic for Ben NanoNote - Kitchen Adventures. (Aewan .ae file)

Maybe it extends further than I thought...

• David and Werner brought avrdude and an AVR cross compiler to the Ben, making the Ben the smallest independent Arduino controller. (Tuxbrain announcement Arduino.cc blog post)

Ben meets Arduino.

ArduNote First Steps - Building and flashing Arduino sketch with NanoNote [2:32 min, 15.4 MB]

• Tuxbrain produced 500 NanoNote universal breakout boards - UBB. (UBB Announcement, More about UBB, Buy UBB)

Tuxbrain only moments away from ...?

• David Kühling made the first steps in using XBurst hardware acceleration features for accelerated mplayer video playing. [6]
• Werner sent several home-made ben-wpan prototypes to early supporters around the world. [7]

From Buenos Aires with love.

• Werner got the first 802.15.4 communication going between two Bens via ATBEN boards, using the stack of the linux-zigbee project. [8]
• Tuxbrain will lead ben-wpan production and has started the process with the PCB fab.[9]
• Werner Almesberger started to make the design to SMT fab process semi-automatic and more reproducible with Makefile.kicad.

atben - 802.15.4 8:10 card dongle.

atusb - 802.15.4 USB dongle.

Xué

• It seems the Xué project (a video camera based on Milkymist) reached a dead end with the original author having stopped working on it, and no new contributors joining. So until someone steps up, we borrowed the Apache Attic concept, and moved Xué to our very own attic. The attic may actually come in handy for a few other Qi projects and proposals that have reached end of life. Over time you may see some cleanup, with things being moved into the attic. Nothing gets lost there, so no worries...

Copyleft hardware attic.

--Qi team 12:00, 4 April 2011 (CET)

Qi 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. Dr. Schaller from gta04.org looking on.

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). [10]
• Many bug fixes and improvements, such as a hardware fix for an FPGA bootup configuration problem [11], 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. [12]

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)

• Werner Almesberger proposed a Universal Breakout Board as the cheapest way to get the relatively flexible NanoNote memory card interface exported for external use (wiki page about UBB).

• David from Tuxbrain announced taking UBB preorders (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.

--Qi team 09:30, 1 March 2011 (CET)

My Job

• selling Ben NanoNote, Milkymist One
• hardware quality, customer support
• Qi server admin (MediaWiki extension tests here)

To Do

(note: if anything classifies as wishful thinking, it's my To Do list. If things are on this list, it means I am not immediately attending to them, and that means they will probably stay on this list for a very long time. But still, all of those things do need to get done, one day...)

Item	Description	Status
Zaurus and Jornada marketing	think about ways to market NanoNotes to current Sharp Zaurus and HP Jornada communities	not started
marketing	think about ways to market NanoNotes to nslu2, local wikipedia chapters, openstreetmap.org communities	not started
Thawte certificate	look into Paymentasia's Thawte certificate (report)	not started
rohs PDF	write proper RoHS document for Sharism Ltd.	not started
email Steve Park	introduce Milkymist, maybe when Milkymist One is available	not started
email Balaji	introduce Milkymist project	not started