neo freerunner freezes when gps turned on

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Mon Aug 11 19:12:23 CEST 2008


On 08/08/2008 03:20 PM, Vimal Joseph wrote:
> I'v posted a problem of frequent freezing of Neo Freerunner.
> http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/support/2008-August/000926.html
>
> It turned out that the problem is with the gps. As the system freezes
> after some time whenever i turnd the gps on. The problem was not there
> with the qtopia image may be because the driver for gps is not there
> in qtopia (I'm not very sure about this).
>
> I'v just installed the 2008.8 image and the phone freezes whenever i
> turned the gps on. With in few seconds the screen freezes and nothing
> works till i remove the battery.
>
> Is any one having same symptoms? What can be the problem?

I was getting that for a while, but it seems to have cleared up.  I 
don't know what specifically changed, but here are the things I did:

Using the 2007.2 image with a few opkg upgrade's applied (during 
July--after the first round of SD card/GPS software fixes), I tested GPS 
with agps and TangoGPS.  Using either, my system would lock up (with 
agps it would happen after a varying number of reads--sometimes as few 
as 15 and once as much as 150--one time, even, it locked after obtaining 
a good first fix).  I tried with and without the SD card installed, and 
the system locked either way.  IIRC, though, I was unable to get it to 
fail when doing a cat /dev/ttySAC1 test ( 
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/GPS#GTA02_GPS )--i.e. it seemed to only 
lock when a GUI was in use.

So, I did another opkg upgrade (still in July), powered off the FR, 
rebooted, and tested again with the same results.

Then, I went to bed (always an important debugging step).  The next day, 
I booted my FR, played with TangoGPS and couldn't get it to lock up.  I 
then played with agps and still couldn't get it to lock up.  This time, 
however, I was testing during mid-day (as opposed to /very/ late at 
night or early in the morning).

I've since written it off as an ephemeral error.  I don't know enough 
about GPS to know whether it could be due to satellite locations, or 
interference, time of day, or ... but it seems to be stable, now--even 
after some August opkg upgrade's.

So, though I can't really tell you what's wrong or how to fix it, I can 
encourage you to keep trying and eventually, you may find it's working fine.

Hope this helps.  Good luck.

Mike




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