Re: Debian first experience made a bit easier...
I installed debian a couple of days ago. 1st try with a new 8GB sandisk uSDHC card, which failed with IO errors. I assume this is because of the SD card speed. Tried with a sandisk 4GB uSDHC, using install.sh, with VFAT boot partition. Install worked fine. Some problems encountered :- Re-camping. I can only tell it is doing this because I left it near my PC and the speakers were picking it up! Happens about every 5-10mins. I did not have this problem with SHR, it is stable for GSM. SMS has a few quirks, but nothing major. I know there is a hardware fix for this, but why no problems with SHR? Wifi, could not connect to my T-Com (Germany) wireless router (WEP). It was picked up using wifi-radar, but failed to get an IP address. I have never been able to connect to this router though, even using command line and config files etc. I have a new linksys N wifi router which I will try it on soon. GPRS worked fine. Midori and tangoGPS do not pick anything up from the internet via USB connection to PC. I can ping google no problem. Midori worked via GPRS. Not sure how to put it into suspend, seems a bit flakey! I have not had time to look into any of these problems yet, but will report findings when I do. -Lee ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: New Life in Openmoko Phones
If you want any FPGA or CPLD work doing, I will do it. Been doing this kind of stuff since fuse blown devices with Palasm. (20 years!) Any glue logic, hardware acceleration, bus interfaces etc. If anyone has ideas about what we could put in a low powered CPLD/FPGA, please come forward, will have the time to do it in about a month. Me. On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Wolfgang Spraul wolfg...@openmoko.comwrote: Hi everybody, (sorry for the cross-posting, I thought spreading the word about gta02-core and new stuff from Openmoko was worth it...) Today Openmoko released additional pieces of documentation about Freerunner hardware: board outline, footprints and netlist. Same as all other releases before - under Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Available at: http://downloads.openmoko.org/developer/schematics/GTA02/gta02_outline_footprints_netlist.tar.bz2 What is this and who is it for? Well, definitely not for end users, not for software developers, not even the typical kernel hacker. The release contains cryptic text files containing data points about our hardware - basically additional information complementing our PDF-formatted schematics release last year. The reason we released this is to support an exiting new project that has emerged over the last few weeks - gta02-core. http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Gta02-core gta02-core is a community project to create a new hardware revision of the gta02 hardware They chose a 100% GPL layout tool, KiCAD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kicad), which uses only text-based files hence they can be checked into typical revision control systems. Since they are text, they are also 'scriptable', i.e. scripts can extract and process data from the layout files. Werner and Dave Ball got it rolling, and are currently working on the re-layout of gta02 (http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/browser/trunk/gta02-core ). The way I see gta02-core is that it opens up a path to new, fully open phone hardware. For the future of the software we are all working on right now - whether it's the kernel, FSO, Paroli/Ophonekit, etc., we either need to design new fully open hardware specifically for it, or we need to find ways to hack into phones that are 'closed' by default (either accidentally or on purpose). gta02-core focuses on the first option, and I hope will receive more attention from the community, and definitely from Openmoko the company. The path is long, even KiCAD itself may need improvements, but if a few more people get interested and join, we may have new fully open phone hardware in 6-12 months. No worries, in all this time of course the Freerunners will remain available (we have enough in stock and are ready for new production runs if necessary), and hopefully they continue to be an interesting development platform for mobile free software projects. Right now, if you want to join the revolution in open hardware development, read the gta02-core wiki page carefully (http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Gta02-core), and join the mailing list (slightly confusingly named gta03 :-)) at http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/gta03 Then see where you can contribute - it's a wide open field with many possible tasks, no matter which background you are coming from. I'll see what I can do. Best Regards, Wolfgang ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Questions and Answers
Sean, I come from a hardware background, chip design mainly, but analogue (note the spelling :-) ) and DSP(MSc) are still strong points. Done chip design for 15 years. Now I do not have a great deal of time at the moment, what with a 3 week old baby and stuff!, but if we can get a few other like minded people together, I am sure we can produce our own open source SoC. And if the credit crunch kicks in properly, even more time. I have heard all about the problems with the crappy Glamo chip. Why not have a small CPLD as a co-processor, into which we load a 'codec' for whatever we are doing at the time, say mp3 decoding, or some video codec. We can get cheap and low power enough CPLD's or FPGA's these days to perform this job. Lets make this thing really open. Could even do the GSM part open source. No more problems with NDA's etc. If you can get to 100K units our own ASIC should become viable. What do you think? Lee. On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 07:11 +0800, Sean Moss-Pultz wrote: Dear Community Here are my answers to your great questions: Q1. The end of the year is a time to look back on the year achievements. So where does Openmoko stands now from a business point of view ? Could you comment on sustainability, on sales numbers, on geographic markets and customer categories ? Let me begin by addressing the market aspects of the question, because I find this part more fundamental. Openmoko was built from the tools and knowledge of the Internet. Our argument for the necessity of an open phone stems from an observation that the Internet breaks down mass markets by making it economically attractive for companies to address niche market segments. We saw a real business opportunity caused by this divergence. So we set out to build a product capable of allowing a company to reach out to its customers and allowing its customers to talk back and to talk to each other. This product was the Neo 1973. We pioneered a new breed of Consumer Electronics companies. The products we build expand our community. The expanded community makes for better products and more sales. Ad infinitum. Perhaps one day people will look back and call such corporate and community teamwork the first, of many, Social Electronics companies. FreeRunner, our major product milestone of 2008, started selling in July. We were more conservative this time with our launch. There were no pre-orders. We sold first through distributors. Our own order processing was entirely automated. Last time it was (painfully) manual. I hope everyone who reads this list will appreciate how much effort FreeRunner took. Openmoko is a very small company. We succeeded in building a smartphone only because we didn't have enough experienced people to tell us that it couldn't be done. While far better than the Neo 1973, FreeRunner had its share of problems. The ancient TI Calypso had registration and SIM card compatibility issues. Audio quality, while slowly improving, still is not perfect. But I can accept these growing pains. We are improving. We are much better than our last product. And community effects continue to materialize in mind-blowing ways. (I will never forget the speed at which we all fixed the GPS issue.) Back to the Basics was our response to your public and private comments. We continue to refocus internal efforts around these ideas. Paroli represents a phone application with a feature set reduced to the bare minimum that is still useful. FSO is our base that will let you easily build what you want. The entire system is becoming more stable as we increase our efforts to have our kernel downloadable from kernel.org. Our technology plan is stabilized at this point. Development priorities for the next six months are clear. Openmoko's goal can be written in one sentence: We want to build consumer products that package the best parts of the FOSS world into products that are relevant and inspiring to ordinary people. Inspiring is the key part of this goal in my mind. Here's a list, off the top of my head, of the things we've inspired to date: * A small project inside of FIC to become an independent company * 24 distributors around the world to join us in getting our products to more people * The development of entire distributions (as opposed to just applications) * Industrial designers to remix our CAD files * A very interesting Framework initiative * A documentation list with the most amazing Community Update emails Using inspiration as a metric, without a doubt, Openmoko was a massive success in 2008. If you want to compare us to Apple and their iPhone I would be flattered, but I also think it's a strange comparison. We are very a small company. Sales are just enough (around 10,000 to date) to survive. Apple has been around for 30 years - Openmoko just under two. I'm extremely excited about our position going into 2009. At the same time,
RE: Wisdom of crowds - the update
Steve, You are assuming that neo customers follow a 1st order model. 2nd order would be +10x -5x +3x -1 sinc function. On Tue, 2008-06-03 at 10:34 -0700, steve wrote: well I am a big fan of the wisdom of crowds. I am a big fan of the army of davids That said, I also understand the limitations of these methods. My method is brutally numeric. this is my training. You begin with a demand forecast. Lets say “X per week.” actually, it’s more sophisticated than that since products go through an initial SURGE and then they settle into a regular run rate. For example. at launch you might see 10X units per week for 1-3 weeks, and then it would taper off to 5X, 3X, 1X. Engineers here will recognize this response function. response to a impulse. basically I track the data on weekly basis and use that to guess the entire demand curve. more data equals better estimate. When a product hits the run rate ( linear) part of the demand curve, then a monkey can do the math. hey boss I sold 1 million last month. I bet I’ll sell a million next month!” thanks monkey. here’s a banana. The big risk is the guessing the intitial impulse. make sense? The other thing that everybody misses is the markets they don’t know about. I have a forecast for Linux Mobile developers. Call that number X. Then I get a call from University XYZ. they want Neo. Then I get a call from medical company PDQ. they want Neos. and the list goes on. adjust demand curves. So the crowd guessed 4000 GTA01? for linux developers only? pretty damn close. But supply constraints biased the result. __ From:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of JW Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 6:24 PM To: community@lists.openmoko.org Subject: Wisdom of crowds - the update hi steve community once upon a time a long, long time ago tim kersten set up a site to track the wisdom of crowds [1] with regard to the question how many freerunners will FIC sell in the first two months the answer can be seen here (click the stats tab) http://openmoko.hobby-site.com/ and is remarkably consistent at a median value of 4000 after over 1000 people voted.In fact this number has stayed very close to 4000 since the low hundreds of votes. so are you going to ask the webshop/pulster/trisoft/whoever to keep track of the real number for you? .after all, if it turns out to be accurate you can use this method for planning your next product! and are you going to tell us how accurate it was :-) ? actually the rules for the wisdom of a crowd to be accurate demand that each guess is independent. and here we have a little pollution in that it is possible for you to see others votes before you vote yourself (although many will not have bothered) anyway it gave us something to do while you folks were busy making phones i reckon it saved at least 12 useless messages to list by frustrated geeks.. (and oops created only 9 more) actually next time we could always use it to guess the release date for son of freerunner jw [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Open Hardware
Hello All, New subscriber, have been lurking for a long time. Since the idea of Openmoko is to be fully open source, why can we not have the same for hardware? My background is in hardware design, specifically FPGA's and ASIC's. The system on chip used by the NEO's could be designed as open source making the whole concept even more open! There already exists a community for open source IP cores for silicon at opencores.org. If we can find enough like minded people we can develop our own SoC for future freerunners. You do need to be selling a lot of chips before it makes financial sense to make your own ASIC, but if enough GTA02's are sold it could give an idea if this is possible or not. We can always make a prototype phone with an FPGA for development What are the communities feelings on this? Are there any other subscribers with the same background? I am nothing to do with opencores.org by the way, but to me it looks like it is looking for a project to pull everything together and this would be ideal! ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Open Hardware
Like i mentioned it is a question of scale, a SoC if you already have most of the IP cores will not be hard to design. (the processor could be the stumbling block however) have a look here for IP that is already available http://www.opencores.org/browse.cgi/by_category You are paying nothing for custom components. The masks for the ASIC will be the big initial cost, but if you sell enough silicon it becomes less of an issue. On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 09:53 -0400, Chris Wright wrote: Openmoko phones are as cheap as they are because they use commodity hardware, I'm given to understand. If you wanted a phone with open hardware, you'd probably be paying thousands for all the custom components. Plus there's testing and certification for various parts, which probably is also expensive It's doable, but it'd be harder by far than the OGP. And consider that the first card released by the OGP costs $1500, which is two or three times the cost of the more expensive commodity cards, while delivering less performance (their target is 20fps in Quake 3 at 1280x1024). ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
Re: Open Hardware
Also, the performance is lower because OGP are using an FPGA and not an ASIC, the same code can be used for an ASIC which will run much faster. On Sun, 2008-06-01 at 09:53 -0400, Chris Wright wrote: Openmoko phones are as cheap as they are because they use commodity hardware, I'm given to understand. If you wanted a phone with open hardware, you'd probably be paying thousands for all the custom components. Plus there's testing and certification for various parts, which probably is also expensive It's doable, but it'd be harder by far than the OGP. And consider that the first card released by the OGP costs $1500, which is two or three times the cost of the more expensive commodity cards, while delivering less performance (their target is 20fps in Quake 3 at 1280x1024). ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community ___ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
