Future Button and LED software spec

Michael 'Mickey' Lauer mickey at openmoko.org
Wed Apr 16 23:51:17 CEST 2008


On Wednesday 16 April 2008 22:08:45 Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 12:04 PM, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer
>
> <mickey at vanille-media.de> wrote:
> > I recently was informed about some criticism that Openmoko did not
> > specify the button and LED usage, so I went forward and specified it.
> >
> >  My RFC is @ http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/FreeRunner/Buttons_and_LEDs
>
> The button usage looks great to me: seems to be very unsurprising,
> what users would expect the buttons to do based on previous
> experience.

Excellent, that's what I aimed for.

> The LED blink patterns look like a good start, but I suspect they will
> tend to evolve over time.  Maybe it ought to be themeable?  We could
> just pick a suitable existing language or file format like MIDI or
> DJ/club/stage light-control language or whatever, which has some
> concept of sections or stanzas that can be triggered by an outside
> event.  (I'm not an expert on that.)  DBus events (which signal the
> mode change) would trigger different parts of the theme.  The daemon
> which listens to the events and switches modes should have the concept
> of a baseline phone state and foreground application state.  That way
> power management will be mostly in charge (it will send events which
> affect the baseline mode), but applications can override some of the
> modes by sending their own dbus events.  (An app could set the current
> app-level LED mode every time it is brought into the foreground by the
> wm, and "pop the stack" by sending a message when it loses focus or
> goes into the background.  Or maybe better, the wm could do it by
> reading some sort of LED mode property that an application can
> optionally export.)

Stop reading my mind! :)

> Is there any possibility of PWM on any of the LEDs?  (e.g. to get the
> Apple-style "breathing" effect)  Then we need a theme language which
> has some concept of intensity or volume, and can express changes in
> intensity either piecewise or as functions (sine etc).  If not, for
> future phones IMO there ought to be a PWM capability, if the
> power-management micro has PWM built-in.

We aimed for PWM LEDs, but our system level guys have problem getting them to 
work -- unclear to me whether it's a kernel or hardware thing. Werner, Andy?

:M:



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