Weekly Engineering News 31/2008
Wolfgang Spraul
wolfgang at openmoko.com
Sun Aug 3 21:36:24 CEST 2008
Hi,
I will attempt to write a weekly email about what is going on in
engineering at Openmoko, software and hardware.
Joerg was in Taipei last week (and still is) and worked very hard on
increasing the quality of our upcoming schematics release, as well as
on improving GTA02 audio quality. Even though he did a lot of tests,
right now he cannot reproduce any audio problems with our latest
generation A6 devices. So we have to see what comes from the factory
next and then test again to see whether any 'buzzing noise' issues are
left.
Mickey's framework team published their next status report (http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/devel/2008-July/000452.html
), and I think overall the framework is making great progress. John
joined the team part-time.
Also, I'm very happy that Stefan decided to come back to Openmoko and
join the framework team as well, working from Braunschweig, Germany
together with Daniel and Jan.
Currently our Taipei-based engineers are divided into software and
hardware side. We decided to setup an independent 'lab' (no name yet,
HTC has one called MagicLab), where hardware and software engineers
work together to scout new chips for FOSS compatibility, build
hardware prototypes with new chips, write GPL device drivers for those
chips, etc. Also to do extensive testing and research in support of
product groups. Maybe Shawn Lin (hardware) and Matt Hsu (software)
will start this lab initially.
As a first job for the new lab, maybe we will take a look at Marvell
CPUs (310) and Marvell Wi-Fi chips. Marvell came a long way recently
in opening up documentation and maybe we can one day do a phone design
around their chips. Anyway it needs investigation by someone :-)
After more than 6 weeks in Taipei, and tirelessly working on Qtopia
bugs, Holger left Taipei and returned to Berlin Tuesday night. Holger
- thank you so much for your fantastic work on Qtopia. Once the dust
settles, I'm sure people will appreciate the Qtopia telephony apps,
and it will give us all the time we need to develop our own telephony
applications based on Mickey's framework. Sean, Marek, Will and me
drove Holger to the airport, and since we were kind of late, we didn't
fill up gas while in Taipei. Holger - you don't know this yet, but on
the way back we almost ran out of gas! We desperately drove around the
dark Taiwan countryside looking for a gas station. At first Will still
tried to use his Neo to find a nearby gas station, but somehow he
quickly came up with more practical ideas such as turning off air-con
to save gas, etc. :-) After 30 minutes or so of Sean making ever more
desperate turns left and right, we finally made it! So we had some
fun... And we hope Holger will be back soon.
We decided to release our latest software stack as Om 2008.8,
following in the footsteps of Mickeys 2007.1 and 2007.2 releases last
year. This will include the Qtopia telephony applications by default,
but we are working on making it easy to switch back to the GTK+
telephony apps, including gsmd, through the Installer. In fact going
forward, our buildhost daily builds will probably just produce a
rootfs with _only_ Installer and Settings application installed, no
telephony apps at all. Neither the GTK+ apps nor the Qtopia apps. Once
the Installer and Settings apps work really well, it should be fairly
easy to connect to Wi-Fi and install whatever packages one wants. This
is the direction we want to take the daily builds to. From the factory
we will ship with a set of applications determined by marketing,
different for each product release. In the long run, we can imagine
that people can upload/order their own image when ordering a Neo, but
our factory and logistics are not able to do this yet, it will be a
long-term goal.
More next week, Best Regards,
Wolfgang
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