[Shr-User] Quick e-mail poll: Still using your Freerunner?

[Al Johnson]

On Monday 08 February 2010, Edward Falk wrote:
> >> I bought my Freerunner over a year ago.  On the first boot, it made a
> >> very loud raucus sound which, as far as I know, blew out the speaker,
> >> as I have never heard an undistorted sound come out of it.
> >
> > If your speaker really is broken, your Freerunner will probably not be
> > much use as a phone unless you use hands-free with it. I suggest you
> > install the latest software so you can be sure it's not a software
> > problem. If it isn't you'll either have to get the speaker repaired or
> > live without sound.
> 
> Is it repairable?

Potentially, though I suspect it was just distorted because the volume 
controls were set too high rather than being permanently damaged.

> > If you want more control, then currently the best
> > idea is to run alsamixer yes, either remotely or from local terminal.
> 
> Glad to hear that there's been progress on volume control, but more than
> a year later and we still need alsamixer for some things?  This is not a
> good sign.

There are a couple of GUI mixers for FSO-based distros. Both are mentioned in 
the wiki now. fso-simplemixer may need a small edit to work with recent fso 
versions though.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_Freerunner_audio_subsystem#Volume_Control

> >> I tried to develop a GPS application for it, but GPS would not work
> >> if there was an SD card installed.
> >
> > I have not heard of such a problem so if It's not exclusive to your
> > hardware, it is fixed by now.
> 
> http://n2.nabble.com/Reason-for-GPS-problems-found-tp528814ef1958.html
> 
> In a nutshell, electrical noise from the SD card slot interfered with
> the GPS.  Your choices were either to remove the SD card or solder in a
> tiny little capacitor between two of its pins.  I also understand that
> there's a software work-around which turns the SD card off when it's not
> being used.

The software change is a proper fix, not a workaround, and the capacitor is 
unnecessary even with rootfs on SD. If you read that thread in full you will 
see that the fix was to properly use the chipset's SD drive strength control 
rather than just set it to maximum.

> > Currently, using the Freerunner as both a phone and a PDA I usually can
> > go for two days before plugging it in overnight. If I use a lot of GPS
> > for example, the time is shorter but it's not bad at all and suspending
> > works very well currently.
> 
> Excellent news.  Hopefully, this is because of improved software (which
> I can install) and not improved hardware (which I can't do anything about).
> 
> > Well, my suggestion would be to start playing around with the latest
> > SHR-Unstable.
> 
> Thanks for the pointers.  If I can find the time, I'll give it a try.
> 
> 	-ed falk
> 
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