GTA03 and E-Ink Interface

[Jaya Kumar]

ni hao and hello OpenMoko friends,

Ok, to explain my interest quickly: what I hope to do is to take an
openmoko and add an E-Ink display, possibly replacing the LCD if
necessary. It is too early for this to be useful to people so I do not
want to consume any significant time or effort from OpenMoko's
developers. I'm willing to do this on my own.

I'm the author of the E-Ink display controller drivers in the mainline
linux kernel, and have been working on making broadsheetfb, the driver
for E-Ink's latest controller behave in a way such that generic Linux
applications can run on it without any modification. I have had some
good initial results which I have shown. eg: videos here ( mozilla
fennec on e-ink,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4WBdagDgSg ) and
various articles here (
http://highlycomposite2.blogspot.com/search/label/e-ink ).

I feel I have a clear idea of how to achieve this idea of adding an
E-Ink panel to a phone, the only constraint is that I need 22-pins of
GPIO. I asked Harald and he had suggestions and pointed out that the
22-pin constraint may be a serious problem. I'm willing to sacrifice
certain other peripherals to get that count. I was searching the
openmoko wiki for GTA03 gpio pinout or some idea of a list of signals
that are brought to surface pads or traces that I could then tap onto.
Is this available?

I had also looked at GTA02 pins:
https://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/doc/hardware/GTA02v4/gpio.txt
based on that, some notes for myself:
- abandon bluetooth 1
- abandon sd card 6
- abandon LCD and repurpose those LCD's interface pins that can be
repurposed as gpio, i think this gives me about 5 pins but not sure if
all are brought to connector (lcdvf0,1,2, lcdhclk, lcdpwren),
- so insufficient gpio. have to use gpio extender connected via i2c or
uart. a big latency penalty though.
- so look at gta03 and hope for inspiration :-)

Any advice and suggestions would be greatly welcome.

Thanks,
jaya