Tuxbrain uploaded their first videos of the Ben NanoNote
http://www.tuxbrain.com/content/doom-y-quake-en-ben-nanonote-videos
videos from tuxbrain
December 7th, 2009recent developments
October 17th, 2009
Mashup – Sept. 23
September 23rd, 2009Hey,
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/
Travelling season
September 9th, 2009Hey,
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
Qi Projects launch
August 27th, 2009Days are getting ever more exciting here at Qi. A few days ago we received the first 20 units of the Ben NanoNote. These units are sample units that were intended for our sign-off on the mechanical design. As you can imagine there were some minor cosmetic tweaks that we had to make after this first run. The color of the latch wasn’t exactly what we wanted and some of the labeling on the keys wasn’t perfectly centered, but it is a great feeling to see our vision coming to live.
Some of the units are going to certification, others to review and a good part to launch qi’s “projects” effort.
As we have seen in the past, software visions of a company and its community are not always the same or even close. At Qi we believe that the community is far more capable of handling and coordinating a product’s software effort. And therefore we want to put the decision which projects to follow up for discussion.
To launch the software projects we will, together with the community, search and select certain projects to receive hardware funding in the form of Ben NanoNotes, either full sponsorship or special prices to project developers.
The software projects can come from a whole range of areas and should drive the device to its limits. The final decision about which projects are to be funded will be taken on the developer mailinglist (sign up here).
To get the discussion started we have assembled a list of potential projects and areas, if you yourself know a project you want to nominate or want to add a whole new idea please join the discussion on the list (sign up here). For now we will start with the list below.
Initial idea list:
OpenWrt
OpenWrt serves as our build environment and our distribution system. Mirko V., Marek, Xiangfu, Lars and Florian and others have made considerable progress and are on a good path to providing a reliable software basis. Qi Hardware believes that a small and individualized Software Image with an up-to-date kernel is the best basis for any end-user software on an embedded device.
Wikipedia
As a first SW use case we envision an offline wikipedia client. The idea is to carry as much knowledge and articles with you on a small and handy device. One possible basis could be the openzim[1] implementation. A variety of clients already exists. We are looking for a resource-friendly and easy-to-use client. Wikitravel may also be a great project to start as an offline version of wikitravel that you can take with you to places that don’t have connectivity may be an interesting application.
sysadmin apps
Due to the usb-boot capabilities of the Ben NanoNote it is the ideal device for sys-admin tasks. Imagine you connect the NanoNote to your server/router/XXX, it automatically boots and displays you the options and settings for the device at hand.
Mobile data/Mobile media
As the NanoNote is so small and handy it is the perfect travel companion, carrying music and short clips. We were thinking in terms of a media player for video and audio. Maybe a picture viewer could also be added to be able to show your favourite pictures (or lolcats[2]).
Messaging Services
At some point in the near future the NanoNote will, via SDIO or a tiny, external device, get RF capabilities. Wouldn’t it be nice to have IM on the NanoNote? Tweet or send message through identi.ca ?
GPS apps
Location is everything. Many usefull and fun applications can be built around GPS, think location, navigation and direction :). Currently, the Nanonote could only support GPS using Sdio, but selecting software applications and starting the porting is a project we would support
[1] http://openzim.org/Main_Page
[2] http://icanhascheezburger.com/
OpenWrt on the Ben NanoNote
August 11th, 2009The Ben NanoNote I got a few weeks ago by qi-hardware is now running OpenWrt!
The patch, published by the manufacturer ingenic itself, which provides linux support for their SoC’s (System-on-a-Chip’s), is roughly cleaned up, unneeded stuff is cleared out and it’s levelled up to 2.6.25.20 (originally the patch refers to 2.6.24.3) and – running!
That’s the good news…
…now the bad ones:
- The mentioned patch by ingenic contains not only linux kernel source but also binary data – ELF-formatted binary code for the mips instruction set! For more details you may want to look at my post on the developer-mailinglist (http://lists.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/developer/2009-August/000162.html). They patch in a proprietary mtdblock-replacement which seems to differ to the original in nand-flash error correction and handling of bad blocks. That’s a no-go – not just because of the reaosons of open hardware/software but also as not being able to forward the patchset to a newer kernel version.
- Strange problems appear with the MMC / SD-card hardware. Randomly the hardware does not recognize the card correctly (more precisely, the card is recognized but not the partition table why the kernel panics because of not finding it’s given root device). Spent days not on this issue, but weren’t able to figure out yet what’s causing this kind of behaviour :(
What’s next?
- get this bloody MMC/SD-card issue fixed
- get the NAND flash supported – either we get the sourcecode of the modified mtdblock driver or get it supported elsewise
- further cleanups of the existing patchset
- level up the patchset to a recent kernel version (2.6.31 would be best – much stuff went upstream / is now handled nativly, e.g. nand-chips > 4 GB don’t need the ingenic hacks anymore, also there’s a new interface for gpio-based keyboards which should make it pretty easy to write a keyboard-driver and allows us to get rid of the existing stuff).
- (re)writing some (of the) drivers (e.g. MMC/SD-card support and support for SDIO, keyboard-driver as mentioned above)
I was in Hamburg this weekend meeting Lars for a hack-session on the Ben NanoNote. He’s also part of the OpenWrt-team and now another proud owner of such a device :)
Besides his ongoing contributions to the Openmoko-project, hopefully he will also help us* spending some of his time on the NanoNote – thank’s a lot at this point for your great work and efforts!
*i’m happy to announce that last week I “became an official developer of the [qi-]core team” with “focus
on the OpenWrt integration” – let’s see what will happen :)