Accelerometer(s), Camera, and Memory

Dee Ayy dee.ayy at gmail.com
Sat Jul 19 20:47:38 CEST 2008


I just heard of OpenMoko and Neo FreeRunner today.  Awesome!

I did see a white one some where that otherwise looks like this, and
it was reported as "open".  Are they related projects/products?

I just subscribed to these 2 lists and could not "reply" to the thread
of interest, but I think this would be best threaded with the
following Community topic:
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-July/021142.html

I found nothing on accelerometers on the Hardware list.

For the past two weeks, I was thinking it would be nice to have "Open
Hardware" along the same philosophy as Open Source Software.  Bear
with me, I've been living under a rock.  Google (or my search terms)
seems better today than two weeks ago when I was thinking "Open
Design".

I noticed the Hardware Highlights lists "3axis Motion Sensors (2)" and
would hope that the developers included 2 accelerometers for the
purpose of sampling the rotation as well as translation.  The
"closedPhone" and "closedPod" only sample translation via their sole
accelerometer.

So my question is the same as Francesco Cat's.  Where exactly are the
accelerometers positioned on the device?
Would someone please confirm why there are 2 accelerometers?

If repositioning of the accelerometers ever comes up, please position
them as far apart as possible on the largest (3D) diagonal as
possible.  On a unit cube (a cube with sides of length 1) positioned
at the origin, with sides parallel to the axes respectively; a
candidate pair would be located at 0,0,0 and 1,1,1.  Unfortunately,
the curved geometry of these phones reduce this dimension.

Is there no camera?  After tracking my stolen phone with 2
accelerometers and GPS, my app will like a nice candid snapshot/video
of the culprit.

My head is spinning.  Somewhere I think I came across an 8GB maximum
SD size.  Can I not use the largest SD size I can find?

Where can I find documentation or APIs?  The above thread mentions
/dev/input/event3  Is it mentioned somewhere at
http://downloads.openmoko.org/ ?

Is the DBoard like a physical simulator for the closedPhone?  In other
words, can I do development with only a Neo FreeRunner?

Regards.




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