• Werner published the first real life signal strength tests for atusd and atben 802.15.4 boards. [1], room coverage, video showing ben-wpan in action.

ben-wpan showing the RSSI of background traffic

• Jane Andreas designed another one of her famous crochet NanoNote cases, this time Jlime inspired. [2]

Ben NanoNote crochet case

• Jane Andreas made the first Ascii Comic for Ben NanoNote. [3]

Aewan in action

• David Kuehling wrote an article about Forth on the Ben NanoNote that was published in the 4/2010 issue of German Forth magazine 4th Dimension. [4], article pdf
• David also continued his porting efforts with GNU Octave, PLplot LUA bindings, the zgv image viewer and others. GNU Octave, PLplot Lua bindings

zgv

Lua bindings for PLplot

gnuplot

Emacs

Milkymist

• German Linux Magazin publishhttp://sharism.cc/wp-admin/post.php?post=444&action=edit&message=1ed a nice introduction to Milkymist One. [5]
• Milkymist One is now also available from Tuxbrain. [6]

SIE/SAKC

• Cristian Paul uploaded the first live GPS I/Q data captured with his SiGe EVB, and asked people to join the software effort. [7]

SiGe 4162T EVB hooked up to SIE

• Carlos Camargo forked the SAKC/SIE project to linuxencaja.net. He asked David from Tuxbrain to leave the project, so SAKC/SIE is now unmaintained at qi-hardware.com. linuxencaja.net has since started AndroidStamp, a breakout board around Freescale i.MX233. [8] [9]

Events

• FOSDEM 2011. 5-6 February in Brussels(Belgium) Tuxbrain will be sharing a stand with Hackable Devices, Tuxbrain will expose NanoNote, MilkyMist ONE and some other products. if you plan to visit FOSDEM don’t forget to go to the hallway and wave :)

Ben NanoNote

• Xiangfu posted a report on disassembling
• David published a video showing the communication between his Ben and an Arduino board

• Xiangfu presented a new project – “xbboot” – aimed at replacing the current usbboot as the main tool to reflash the Ben
• Ernest Kugel posted he got xburst tools working on Slackware
• David created a logo contest for the OpenWrt splash screen
• Mirko re-raised the environment / identity partition issue

SAKC

• Adam sourced all parts necessary for the next small run of SAKC, and sent a package to Carlos which Carlos already received in Bogota. That includes LCMs, FPGAs, crystals, even some HopeRF modules to play with. Carlos is now waiting for his new PCBs to arrive (currently scheduled for May 5) before starting to mount the next load of SAKC boards. We don’t know yet how many fully working boards we will have in the end, but if you are interested in one please speak up. They will go to people who can contribute back the most…
• Carlos reported he has a soft MIPS processor from Open Cores working on SAKC FPGA

Milkymist

• Sebastien announced the release of Milkymist 0.5
• Sebastien presented new Milkymist Logos and Stickers
• Sebastien congratulated Yann on his GSoC project which will serve as a basis for the future OS of Milkymist
• Adam finished a first pass of routing of the PCB of the Milkymist One interactive VJ station, currently under review.

OpenWrt

• Mirko announced the plan to release different flavors of the uboot, the rootfs as well as the kernel, among them a Debian compatible kernel image

Misc

• David announced Tuxbrain was chosen to be one of the representatives of the Open Economy sector in the 20+20 project of Escuela de Organizacion Industrial (Industrial Organization School)
• David send a list of events organized by the Spanish copyleft hardware community happening in may
• Mirko announced changes in the wiki and Wolfgang gave more details
• Wolfgang announced the upgrade of indefero to version 1.0
• Wolfgang setup public searchable archives for the #qi-hardware IRC channel on freenode, and all commits into projects at projects.qi-hardware.com will trigger a 1-line commitlog into #qi-hardware as well.

We certainly think so. We’ve long been hoping to find ways of making different open and copyleft hardware platforms talk to each other and today it finally happened!

David of Tuxbrain announced that he managed to get his Ben and an Arduino setup to talk to each other. In a video he uploaded you can see how he boots the Ben and tells a connected Arduino board to switch a small light on and off again. This might not sound very impressive, but it is a great first step. We hope his example will inspire other copyleft hardware and maker enthusiasts to create nifty setups using a Ben plus Arduino + X :)

If you have questions or ideas, make sure to read the Qi Wiki and subscribe to the developer mailinglist.

this is the first issue of the Qi community news. It tries to capture events, discussions and developments in the Qi community. This issue tries to capture the developments over the past three weeks.

• Mirko L. announced a new official Image
  Highlights of the new image:
  • music player GMU added
  • gmenu2x as graphical launcher
  • faster boot time due to rootfs split

• OpenWrt 10.03 Backfire was released and the Ingenic Xburst platform is now officially supported

• Mark Adrian Bell created a HowTo about Time settings on the NN and how to use the NN as a calendar

• Wolfgang announced an IRC webchat as an easy way to get support here at Qi

• lots of movement on the debian front, with a compile flag that could solve the problems

• Zeartul announced that with the current kernel the NN is now completely compatible with Dingoo A320 games

• Richard Weinberger proposed splitting the rootfs in two in order to save boot time

• Wejp released gmu 0.7.0, a multi platform music player

Gmu on Ben NanoNote

• Wolfgang improved the wiki, adding a threaded forum, support for anonymous edits (hopefully spam-safe), support for OpenID, PDF previews, timeline, charts, external data. GraphViz and SiteChart were removed because nobody used them and they are not maintained in the MediaWiki SVN.

• Jonathan Nieder proposed some ideas how to get xburst-tools into Debian, along with some patches to get things started.

• David Samblas published a tutorial on how to port a simple app (gnuchess) to NanoNote using OpenWrt build system

• Rubén Berenguel ported Gnugo to the Ben, and proposed several other math related packages to continue with (pari/gp, octave, gforth).

• Carlos Camargo uploaded a video showing SAKC as an oscilloscope.

SAKC as a simple scope.

• Guylhem posted binaries to flash the NanoNote from OS X

/mirko

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 :)

It is now also available from Hackable:Devices.

The price is 99€ plus shipping.

Check out his latest blog post.

http://www.tuxbrain.com/en/content/本-ben-nanonote-available

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/