News aggregator

Mo Da Browser aims to be a stable, small, usable browser for Android.

Viking is a GTK2-based GPS data editor and viewer.

GeoToad is a geocaching query tool, its data can be synced straight to your GPS, iPod, PDA, or cell phone in over 20 different formats.

Rikulo UI is a framework for creating incredible cross-platform Web and native mobile applications using Dart and HTML5.

After almost one year of fixes and new functionalities here is libam7xxx-0.1.3. libam7xxx is a library to communicate with USB pico-projectors like, for instance, the Philips/Sagemcom PicoPix devices; you can read more about it in the previous stories:

• On USB projectors, linux and libam7xxx
• An Open Source driver for USB pico projectors

The devices supported in this release are:

• Acer C110
• Acer C112
• Aiptek PocketCinema T25
• Philips/SagemCom PicoPix 1020
• Philips/SagemCom PicoPix 2055

With this release PicoPix 1020 and 2055 are finally fully working, thanks to the people who helped fixing and testing the code, here is the entry from the NEWS file:

News for v0.1.3: ================ * Better documentation * Ported to Windows (compiles with MinGW) * Added a minimal replacement of usb-modeswitch to use on systems where the latter is not available * Added support for Acer C112 (Thanks to Richard Wisenoecker) * Added support for Aiptek PocketCinema T25 (Thanks to Matti Koskinen) * Added some contrib scripts * Added support for setting the projectors zoom mode * Added multi-device support, now more than one projector can be used at the same time on the same system (Tested by Konstantin Lohmann) * Added support for Philips/SagemCom PicoPix PPX 2055 * Fixed some problems with the supported Philips/SagemCom PicoPix devices, now these devices are fully working (Thanks to the Certik family)

Debian packages for i386 and amd64 are available at ao2.it/debian.

If anyone knows people at Sagemcom, would you put me in contact with them? They didn't reply to my previous messages to their support service address. I'd like to ask if they may be interested in providing some test units or to sponsor some development-time to make the pico-projectors work on Android.

Here is the shortlog between v0.1.2 and v0.1.3 for those interested in the development details:

Antonio Ospite (60): picoproj: add a note about image dimensions and native resolution Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/rettichschnidi' into mingw-port HACKING.asciidoc: fix cmake invocation examples picoproj: use MAP_PRIVATE in the mmap call am7xxx: use hex notation for USB endpoints am7xxx: fix setting the USB configuration am7xxx: MinGW does not have endian.h, provide fallbacks am7xxx: don't look for the math library when compiling for Windows picoproj: issue a warning when passing "-f" more than once picoproj: fix a typo picoproj: replace mmap() with more portable file stream operations Don't set -pedantic-errors in CMAKE_C_FLAGS, it breaks check_symbol_exists() Add a CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE to compile with MinGW HACKING.asciidoc: add a section to explain Windows cross compilation Merge branch 'mingw-port' TODO: mention the plan about GStreamer Add a simple usb_mode_switch clone for am7xxx devices README.asciidoc document how to get libam7xx running on MS Windows README.asciidoc: add Royaltek PJU-2100 to the AM7XXX based devices list HACKING.asciidoc: add info about getting and building libam7xxx mingw_cross_toolchain.cmake: set the MINGW variable to True am7xxx-play: get the framerate from the video stream am7xxx-play: add a fallback definition for ENOTSUP am7xxx-play: check if sigaction is available am7xxx-play: check if strtok_r is available HACKING.asciidoc: add info about compiling am7xxx-play for Windows README.asciidoc: add info about running am7xxx-play.exe on Windows README.asciidoc: add Aiptek PocketCinema T25 to the AM7XXX devices list am7xxx: rename am7xxx_header.unknown0 to am7xxx_header.direction doc: update the list of supported devices contrib: add other supported devices to 55-am7xxx.rules contrib: add an example of how to start displaying images automatically Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/rettichschnidi' am7xxx: implement support for the AM7XXX_PACKET_TYPE_ZOOM picoproj: support setting the zoom mode am7xxx-play: support setting the zoom mode am7xxx: update signature and documentation of am7xxx_set_power_mode() picoproj: make the help about power mode more consistent am7xxx-play: make the help about power mode more consistent contrib: add a test image to show how zoom modes work Merge branch 'am7xxx_set_zoom_mode' doc: update Doxygen configuration examples: support multiple devices am7xxx: add support for Philips/SagemCom PicoPix PPX 2055 picoproj: clarify that when AM7XXX_ZOOM_TEST is set no image gets sent am7xxx: print text description of the 'direction' field am7xxx: assign device_list next to its first use am7xxx: add a note on the symmetry of read_header() and send_header() am7xxx: don't mention AM7XXX_DIRECTION_OUT in read_header() Fix an error when compiling with both -O0 and -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 am7xxx: detect unexpected responses to AM7XXX_PACKET_TYPE_DEVINFO requests am7xxx: cache device info in am7xxx_get_device_info() am7xxx: make libam7xxx work with Philips/Sagemcom PPX projectors Merge branch 'fix-devinfo-for-PicoPix' contrib: add the am7xxx-play-window.sh script am7xxx: fix coding style am7xxx-play: rename 'packet' to 'in_packet' am7xxx-play: remove an unreachable break am7xxx-play: switch to avcodec_encode_video2() Release version 0.1.3 Matti Koskinen (1): am7xxx: add support for Aiptek PocketCinema T25 Reto Schneider (5): Make example programs optional. Stop CMake if function avformat_open_input not available, print an error message. Prevents compile errors later on. Fix usage of FIND_PATH, allow $FFMPEG_DIR to be used. Fix typo. Add missing break. Richard Wisenoecker (1): am7xxx: add support for Acer C112

A blood pressure meter with a USB port happened to land into my hands, only Windows was supported for downloading data to a PC, and I wanted to see how the device interacted with the software and try to “free” it so that it could be used elsewhere. The device is a Visomat Double Comfort, IMHO it is overpriced already (note, with no backup battery to keep the clock when you change the main batteries), and the limitation on what software you could use to access your data was upsetting.

The result of my efforts to make it more accessible can be found in the visomat-utils repository, in the README there are some details about the communication protocol and the data format used by the device.

The user manual of the device says that when connected to the PC the unit cannot perform pressure measurements, well this is not completely true, there is a command to start a new measurement via USB, however I didn't find how to restore USB communication after the measurement. BTW, if anyone find a creative use of a USB triggered air pump, let me know :).

I didn't feel like tearing the device apart and dump the firmware, as I am not the owner of the device, but maybe some more commands can be found by looking there.

Design decisions

The original developers decided to expose the device as a USB CDC (in the ACM variant) and then use a custom protocol over USB bulk messages, that makes it necessary to install some CDC drivers on Windows even if the serial interface is not actually used.

IIRC an alternative way to use custom USB protocols on Windows is to use fake HID devices, which do not require the user to install any drivers, anyone more into Windows can confirm that?

Final words

I've seen that there are more open and cheap blood pressure meters, like the ewh-bp-project. Does anyone know if device like that are already in production or if there are similar alternatives to recommend?

I've uploaded a simple wrapper around sudo, for executing commands as another user with full access to the X display (GLX works too); I call it xudo. The script basically does two things:

• Authorize the user: xauth extract - $DISPLAY | sudo -u SOMEUSER xauth merge -
• Run the command preserving the DISPLAY environment variable: sudo DISPLAY="$DISPLAY" -u SOMEUSER SUDO_OPTIONS

  And you can of course use the -i or -s sudo options to get a shell as the other user, from where you can launch graphical applications.

All the other bits in the script are really just boilerplate.

Keep in mind that security-wise this is indeed a little stricter than the xhost +local: and xauth generate combination, as it authorizes only the user you want, but the command you execute still gets access to the whole X server, so you still don't want to run programs you don't trust using this method.

Hey,

my trip to Paris has many nice aspects, one of them I spent more time on irc today than over the last few weeks combined. One thing that popped up was vmx’s write access to the paroli git.

Today I finally managed to activate it. vmx has been helping mdt to merge the tacheles and master branches to allow proper development again :) Of course there is more refactoring, so the tacheles branch is still there, but with a different purpose this time :)

vmx uses paroli on debian and as I said has been very helpful and involved in many discussions lately. So I say thank you and welcome vmx :)

In related news:

Due to my laziness, which convinced me not to set up a mailman on my server, we have created a google group to enhance our communication, as we are getting more developers, which are all eager to add their own ideas and touches to paroli.

You are all invited to join the discussion there and guide us to making paroli a better application :)

Stay stuned :)

/mirko

Some ideas have been bothering be for a while, decided to write them down here, maybe they’re interesting to someone else too.

Nokia 900

• A great device hardware-wise. Nice to see it running Linux but phone stack still closed. See ‘This is Linux from Finland
• I wouldn’t be surprised it it was already patented, but I think it’s a great idea to zoom in/out by making a circular motion on the touch screen - maybe something Openmoko browsers could use?
• When you turn N900 screen to portrait position it’ll start the ’simple’ phone app - and on landscape it runs the ‘computer’ stuff. A nice idea again!

Paroli

• Work to make it work smoothly on SHR is being done (GREAT job Laszlo!!!), see http://git.paroli-project.org/
• Some UI hacks might be also there soon. I myself prefer having the buttons on bottom of the screen to be always able to see what’s on the screen.
• Waiting to see a working package on SHR to allow easy installation: opkg install paroli

SHR

• Settings is nice, supports stuff from power management to connections to much more, also looks good.
• Phone apps work OK though slow when reading stuff from SIM (-> opimd support, where are you…?)
• I like the buttons at the bottom of the screen - but they could use some rethinking:
  • Most of the time the ‘next’ button (be it new, OK, send) is on the bottom left.
  • Sometimes there’s a close/exit/back button on bottom right, sometimes not. This makes you have to close an app (for example call log) from illume top bar. Not very nice.
  • Now there are 1-4 buttons next to each other (settings: only the quit button, phone log: call/add/numbers/duration)
  • I like the ‘options’ -button of contacts to show more stuff. How about moving ‘new’ there and adding ‘close/back/exit’ on the bottom right?
• A single button to take you to ‘home view’ would be nice - that’s why iPhone has that one HW button.
• Hundreds of contacts in the contacts list makes it a pain to scroll. Some thoughts:
  • The finger scrolling works nice
  • The scrollbar’s too small to use
  • How about starting the view from middle of the list, not from the beginning (to reduce need of scrolling)
  • How about creating jump buttons:
    • Alphabetic, like Paroli does
    • or start/middle/end
• So far SHR’s been the most usable distro I’ve had. People are not complaining about the audio quality, suspend/resume is reliable, nice GUI’s to start GPRS & GPS etc.
• I’d like to be able to adjust the volume during call
• I’d like to see the duration of the call during a call (can I already see it? Don’t know..

Misc

• We’re still waiting to be able to use the accelerometers to silent the phone / answer a call / something. Saw today Mickey started to write accelerometer support for FSO - very nice!

(also have a look at my outdated Openmoko wishlist)

Tags: freerunner, mobile, planet-fnoss, planet-openmoko, software

Publication d'un nouveau tutoriel qui ravira plus d'un développeur en herbe. En effet, ce tutoriel vous permettra de développer un petit programme sur votre freerunner.

Développer pour l'OpenMoko Freerunner

A réaliser une seule fois :

1. Télécharger la toolchain et la désarchiver.

2. Copier le dossier "openmoko" de la toolchain dans le dossier "/usr/local" du Pc.

3. Rendre éxécutable le script scripts-env.

A réaliser dans chaque terminal avant de compiler :

4. Exécuter le script d'envirronement "setup-env"

5. Rajouter la variable d'environnement.

Pour compiler :

6. Commande make

Liens vers les fichiers :

Fichier Helloworld.

Fichier Make.

Remarques:

Il se peut que lors de la compilation, un message d'erreur apparaisse en indiquant que la commande "ccache" n'existe pas. Installer cette commande et recompiler.

L'université de Standford présente le premier APN libre.

Bien sûr le design laisse à désirer, mais ce prototype a fait ses preuves.

L'intérêt est de laisser à chacun la possibilité de programmer lui-même son appareil.

Une démonstration montre l'exemple d'une prise de vue surexposée d'un côté et sous-exposée de l'autre.
La correction qui serait habituellement appliquée plus tard sur ordinateur est ici effectuée immédiatement par le système embarqué.

C'est donc un nouveau domaine qui commence à être conquis par le concept de matériel ouvert.

Hello all,

Although I am not a blogger, I think we need alternative ways to let community know what we are doing at #gta02-core project. So I decided to start this blog and hope it will help community to get in touch with latest news from our project.

For those who do not have a clue about what #gta02-core is about, take a look here

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Gta02-core

If you still have doubts, please drop me an email and I'll be glad to dissipate those. But there should be enough information there, like mailing list address and archives.

So I'll try to weekly post news about the project here. Very summarized, since I am not someone that speaks or writes too much.

I will try to post here every Friday.

Let the power of Open Design Hardware be with you.

Álvaro

Welcome to the first edition of #gta02-core-news, for September 5th 2009.
ProgressThere has been not much progress this week. Mostly discussion about shielding, debug connector FPC and audio ECN collection. One OT discussion about binary drivers was also very active. And a new schematic - wireless on-board.
Bad news from OpenMokoWerner brought us some piece of bad news, apparently OpenMoko might not have as many parts in stock as initially thought. We'll have to wait for more information now, but this might put us on a bad position, because some parts are very hard to source.
ShieldsRask has asked a local supplier a quote for custom shields for #gta02-core. I think personally this prices are a bit high, we might have to live with our current shields if possible.
The footprint problemsWerner brought our attention to the fact that several manufacturers have different values for footprint parameters. This will require us to choose some common values ans use them, instead of using some non existent industry standard.
New on-board wlanYour blogger finished the 1st version of the on-board WLAN module. There's an ECN pending for this module too. Some component names had to be renamed but there will exist a mapping somewhere.
SPI and debug connectorRask found some inconsistencies in the way we use SPI on the debug connector, which might cause debug connector to interfere with WLAN.
Printed Circuit BoardThere has been some discussion on board parameters, like minimum trace widths and vias. Other parameters were also discussed, like surface finishes. We're still trying to find out a good balance between our requirements and total board cost.
Quotes of the week" At the end, i think we should consider that this will be *only* a prototype and not a usable phone, so we don't need a lot of gimmicks which are not absolutely required. "
Rene Harder

" It really helps then if you don't have to suspect every single solder joint to be a traitor to the cause ;-) "
Werner Almesberger

C'est la rentrée !
Les p'tits mokos ont-ils préparés leurs cartables et offert une pomme au professeur après avoir bien travaillé sur leurs cahiers de vacances tout l'été ?

Que nenni : ils ont plutôt bricolés leurs Neo Freerunners et ont été très bavards sur le forum !
C'est parti pour un billet mensuel bien rempli et publié à temps cette fois

Actualités

Voici une sélection d'informations intéressantes :

• Deux sondages sont en cours pour connaître les distributions (62% pour SHR) et chargeurs de démarrages (72% pour Qi) les plus utilisés.
• Après délibération, Angus Ainslie arrête le support de Om2009 pour se consacrer à Paroli sur SHR.
• L'accélérateur graphique Glamo commence à fonctionner grâce au travail de Thomas White.
• De nouveaux sites web débarquent dans la mokosphère : une communauté Tchèque, un blog GTA02-Core et un nouveau site pour Qualee.
• La distribution QtMoko sort en version 8.
• SHR-today est une application de verrouillage d'écran qui affiche des informations utiles.
• Jamoko est un nouveau lecteur Jamendo pour Openmoko.
• Bearstech sponsorise l'Open Source Developers Conference France 2009 (2/3 Octobre à Paris).
• Une rencontre a eu lieu à Paris le 28 août. J'ai failli y participer. Je me rattrape en préparant celle du jeudi 10 septembre à grenoble.

Consultez également la dernière page Community Updates pour plus de news.

Vacances oblige, le blog a connu de longues semaines de silence et début et fin de mois.

J'avais déjà parlé des tutoriels vidéos de DiouxX dans ce billet.
La bonne nouvelle est qu'il a accepté d'annoncer lui-même ses nouveaux tutoriels vidéos sur ce blog.
Il vient d'ailleurs d'en publier un sur la configuration réseau du PC hôte (et le prochain devrait intéresser plus d'un développeur ... mais c'est un secret, restez à l'écoute).

Une autre excellente nouvelle est l'intérêt du Bresil pour Openmoko. Espérons que cela donnera des ailes au projet.

Deux autres billets concernent les activités de Bearstech avec le HaR2009 et Hackable:1.

Le reste parle d'actualités au sujet de Nokia, LiMo, Dell et autres infos diverses.

Notez au passage que ce billet est le n°200 si j'ai bien compté

Plusieurs étapes importantes viennent d'être franchies au niveau du forum :

• plus de 9000 messages
• plus de 500 inscrits
• plus de 900 discussions

Un véritable sursaut d'activité (voir les statistiques ci-dessous) qui fait plaisir à voir !

Souhaitons la bienvenue à : MSbart29, pandark, henroel, Valraven, Kezine et chami.
Voici une sélection non-exhaustive des nombreuses discussions du mois.

Communauté :

• [2009-09-05] Braderie de Lille
• [2009-09-10] Pique-nique à Grenoble

Logiciels :

• [SHR] Version Full 08/08
• connection automatique de néo à l'ordinateur
• [QtMoko] Version 8
• Navigateur internet - Qu'utilisez-vous ?
• [QTMoko] Vous l'avez testé?
• [mokotouch] Vidéo impressionnante.. Reste à voir ..
• [Qalee] Une distrib à suivre (0.0.3 out)
• Script pour simplifier la vie
• Tutoriels Vidéo

Matériels :

• Écran cassé :((
• touche "aux" cassée
• Proposition d'explication des différentes mémoires ...
• Vends FreeRunner, comme neuf, 200€

Projets :

• [Maemo5] Nokia N900
• Programme TV sur FR

Comme vous le constatez, il y a l'embarras du choix !

A l'inverse du forum, le wiki à été exceptionnellement calme ce mois-ci.
Une seule nouvelle page a été crée, mais elle est très complète et concerne le fameux bug #1024 ("recamping bug") et l'autonofix (son correctif matériel).

Deux nouveaux sondage ont été crées : l'un au sujet des dénominations possibles des sympathisants d'Openmoko et l'autre au sujet des mémoires et modes de démarrage du Neo Freerunner.

Les pages suivantes ont également été mises à jour :

• SHR
• Marseille et ses environs

Statistiques du site

• Graphique des visites :
  (ça remonte doucement)

• Nombre de visites par mois :
  (On repasse la barre des 1600 visites/jour en moyenne)

(Cliquez sur l'image pour l'agrandir)

• Visites par jour :

• Statistiques du forum :
  (ce n'est plus un sursaut, c'est un décollage !)

• Les statistiques du wiki :

Bilan

Après un an de foisonnement, la communauté mondiale se concentre autour de SHR pour notre plus grand plaisir.
Mais cela n'empêche pas d'autres distributions comme QtMoko ou Qalee de progresser en apportant des idées innovantes.

Du côté francophone, la spectaculaire progression du forum est un indicateur flagrant de bonne santé !
Aussi, je voudrais en profiter pour remercier les posteurs acharnés que sont nos super-mokos : piratebab, Burn2, okhin, sleg, KaZeR, misc, kimaidou, asthro, Garth, FreedomSound ... et tous les autres !

Hey,

After yet another long period of not blogging here comes one of these rare occasions.

Several things I want to run through :)

I think it is official now that Angus will not continue to pursue the path of a separate distribution but put his time and effort towards a stable branch in SHR. I am not sure yet what that will mean for paroli but I hope not too many bad things :)

In general I can say that the project is still up and running and that we make progress, in small steps but progress. Just the other day did vmx and mdt complete the merge of the tacheles branch and master. This brings a few changes in the background and in essence means a lot of work as most of the services will have to be adapted. However, I am very happy about this as it was time that the core of paroli got cleaned and restructured to make things more flexible and usable.

I will try to get on to this and I have heard that more and more people work on small things surrounding paroli. Please do not be put off by me not responding instantly or taking a while, if you think it is too long, just pinch me again. I want to give more developers access to the git itself as I see me as the bottleneck right now. So let me know if you wanna join and do things with us :)

The merging will also allow paroli to more easily run on top of pyneo[1] without loosing support for fso.

As for myself I am working a lot on Qi Hardware[2], mainly spreading the word, getting software and hardware developers interested and supporting them with what they need. So if you wanna help out there let me know :) One of the great parts of my job is to distribute “early access hardware” to new projects in our projects effort [3]. So yesterday I received 13 samples. 2 went to OpenWrt[4] right away as they are building the “official” image for the Ben NanoNote.

I was terribly excited to finally hold a “Ben” in my hands and I wanted to share a few pictures [4] with you. I hope you like them :)

I will visit a few places and conferences over the next couple of weeks/months. So I might be coming to your area :) I will post when and where I’ll be and always love small meetings in pubs or likewise to discuss Qi Hardware, Paroli, the NanoNote or whatever else comes our way :)

Have a good one,

/mirko

[1] http://www.pyneo.org

[2] http://www.qi-hardware.com

[3] http://www.qi-hardware.com/2009/08/27/qi-projects-launch/

[4]

Ben NanoNote Top

Ben NanoNote opened

NanoNote compared to Freerunner

Suite à la proposition de l'APRIL d'organiser des apéros de rentrée, plusieurs rencontres sont planifiées : Lille, Lyon, Strasbourg ... (voir le wiki de l'APRIL).

Voilà une façon conviviale de se retrouver pour discuter de Logiciels Libres ... et de matériels ouverts

De mon côté je prépare également un évènement :
le jeudi 10 septembre à Grenoble.

Le lieu choisi est assez insolite puisqu'il s'agit d'un monument historique : La Casamaures.

Vous êtes tous cordialement invités à venir nous rejoindre à partir de 18h30 sur le parvis de cette superbe battisse au style Oriental.
C'est un pique-nique participatif : n'oubliez pas d'apporter nourriture, boissons ... et surtout bonne humeur !
Vous trouverez toutes les informations utiles à cette adresse.

L'entrée est gratuite et ouverte à tous, familles et amis non-informaticiens compris
Alors venez nombreux !

Juan Lucas sent me an email containing a link to the Tellus Project, a framework developed to allow gvSIG Mobile to synchronise data via OpenMIS.

There's some really great stuff on there, I especially liked the demonstration of Bittorrent synchronisation. Juan Lucas has started a new blog with more details about the use of this software on Openmoko / Maemo here.

Publication d'un nouveau tutoriel ayant pour but de vous expliquer la marche à suivre afin d'obtenir Internet sur votre OpenMoko Freerunner en passant par votre Pc.

Internet sur freerunner via pc

Une remarque est nécessaire : la série de 4 commandes est à rentrer lors de chaque démarrage de votre PC. C'est pour cela que je mets à votre disposition un script que j'ai réalisé permettant d'effectuer cette étape.

The Openmoko (being a free/open phone) community has released community updates again. To see what’s happened during the last two weeks, check http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates/2009-09-02

To me personally the biggest thing is that Paroli (the telephony app) is being worked on to run on SHR (one of the distros)

Tags: mobile, planet-fnoss, planet-openmoko