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

http://www.openmobilefree.net/?p=367

http://www.openmobilefree.net/?p=359

http://www.tuxbrain.com/content/doom-y-quake-en-ben-nanonote-videos

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/

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

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 :)