2008.12 with Illume
I love the Openmoko phone. The development has been very nice and fast during the last month or so: faster bootup times, no µSD card corruption anymore, fast GPS fixes and so on. Yet, there are some things that I’d like to see implemented.
UPDATE: Only a couple of days after writing this post I was contacted by people pointing me to apps they’d written earlier or because I gave them the idea and they liked it. This is the reason I like open source and the community. I hope that as many as possible could benefit from this list to get new ideas or to find apps they’ve been missing too.
THIS LIST IS OUTDATED!! Now using SHR w. Paroli and the development has moved on.. Outdated, I said!
UPDATE2 (06/2009): I’m now using Om2009 with Paroli so I updated some wishes here..
Don’t take this as ‘the phone is useless without these’ or anything like that, I just want to point out what things I’d like to see there. Some are real needs when some just some wild ideas. In case someone feels likes some of this and is able to implement it, feel free :)
- Finnish illume keyboard layout and dictionary DONE!
- An easy way to create subfolders in the menu DONE!
- Working navigation software DONE!
- AGPS DONE!! (it’s integrated in FSO-gps!)
- A tool to update and remove local Openstreetmap .png map tiles DONE / DONE
- GUI package manager DONE / DONE
- Terminal and full keyboard (with on/off-button) installed by default!! (~DONE – I wrote it :)
- Ipk for PyPenNotes DONE
- Graphical audio mixer with less options than what alsamixer has.. DONE
- Simple audio recorder DONE
- A working mp3/ogg player that doesn’t kill the phone, that let’s you listen to large files (podcasts..), pause and rew/ff easily and remembers where you were when you turned it off. DONE
- A working web browser (bookmarks, secure connections, tabs, images, frames) – Midori is very much there :) (and woosh)
- Tool to change and manage ‘profiles’: office (wifi, no gps, only vibration, no audible alert, ..), outside (wifi off, loud alert, maybe GPS on) car (gps on, wifi off, possibly connect to car’s bluetooth-HF, screen on all the time, charge) Started for Om2008 Paroli has some of this around..
- Tool to easily record GPS tracks with the ability to create notes/nodes to be added to OSM, like change of speed limit, change of pavement, number of lanes, road to the left/right, bridge and so on. DONE but not tested yet/don’t know how to use
- Tool to control Kaffeine/other DVD players over WLAN (don’t have bluetooth on my desktop computer), maybe other media players too (ok, mpd & http, I know..) DONE++ for bluetooth (but fails on 2008.12 because bluez has a bug..)
- Illume menu icons sort alphabetically, not capital letters first, then small letters. Now the order is Audiorec Dillo Locations Messages Neon epiano omview orrery which is not alphabetical.
- Ipk packages for
- http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Mokostat
- http://projects.openmoko.org/projects/dvx/
- A lightsaber that recognizes the movements of the phone
- Stable kernel & hardware that doesn’t use any power, always works, never crashes, supports everything and so on :)
- A simple mplayer frontend to play videos (done, I guess..)
- Foxytags speed camera warning
- Ringtone manager (done for SHR)
- Text-to-speech to tell me who’s calling
- A smart way to install opkg packages in the internet with the web browser on Openmoko. Maybe a custom installer tool for opkg.org?
Many of you might think ‘Hey, let’s try to get the kernel stuff stable first, ok?’ and I agree. But with my skills all I can contribute in the kernel level is to make a wish ‘try to make it stable’. I don’t know how to patch or compile a new kernel so that’s why I concentrate on the higher level things: the tools people need and want to make the phone useful to beat and replace their old phones. Some of this will not happen for years, some might require work only for two hours or something. And yet, I’m very happy with the current state of Freerunner! Many cool things work already, well done everyone so far!
ps. check Kustomizer to convert clean Openmoko distro installation to a usable phone/pda/toy, my ‘car mode’ script is available here – if you know how to make it better, please let me know!
Any comments on my ‘wishes’? Do you know if something has been already implemented? What would you like to see?
Related posts:
- TED – Ideas worth spreading TED is an nonprofit organization devoted to ‘Ideas worth spreading’....
Here are my additions to this list
* Ability to configure Bluetooth (gui askpass mechanism for BT PIN)
* Use bluetooth HID devices
* Act as a bluetooth HID device
* Ability to configure WiFi (Gnome Network Manager style)
i know those things can be done throgh the console… but come on :)
tui.sf.net has mokomapper.py I use for some (trivial) mapping on openmoko.
@Valisi: good points.
@Pavel: I suppose this is what you mean: http://tui.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tui/tui/mokomapper.py?view=markup
It looks good though I don’t fully understand how it works – I take it writes me a new line in an .osm file (where is this file saved?) every time I press a button. Am I correct that you use other GPS software (tangogps?) to show the map and route? Does mokomapper.py save route/path all the time or only when I press something? It looks very useful, thanks for this, will try to learn to use it (you should promote your projects a bit more :). BTW I guess that it’s written for GTA01, I get this message all the time:
sh: cannot create /sys/class/leds/gta01:vibrator/brightness: nonexistent directory. I replaced it with /sys/devices/platform/neo1973-vibrator.0/leds/neo1973\:vibrator/brightness but I can’t see the vibrator nor the leds doing anything. I need to get outside to try this :)
http://www.opkg.org/package_97.html
tangogps maps uploader :) tara aaa :)
@yiyiek1: WOOOOOOOOW!!!!!! Very nice!!! You’re SO cooool!
I get this error when trying to run it:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/osmupdater.py”, line 2, in
import elementary, os,time, sys
ImportError: No module named elementary
I suppose it’s because python-elementary is missing but I can’t find it anywhere. Do you know where I could find it?
python elementary is on :
http://shr.bearstech.com/shr-testing/ipk/armv4t/
Yes, mokomapper.py is what I meant.
Vibrator is only used to acknowledge button presses (tactile feedback); you should be able to test that indoors.
Yes, I’m using tangogps for map display. I’m using internal logs from gllin. Oh and take a look at mapperdecode (in the same cvs)… it converts the osm to something that is acceptable to josm.
@yoyoek1: Looks like a bad idea to me to install stuff from SHR repositories.. Anyway, I did it and installed the required libraries (three or four files) from the SHR repository and then get this on openmoko: http://pastebin.com/m2af9bae7 – I was told this means that it’d be compiled against some other version of enlightenment or something.. I also tried the versions from shr-unstable with no better results.
I’d be happy to run on my desktop Ubuntu but there it fails to recognize the png files and gives me http://pastebin.com/m50f10ee7 – must be something wrong in the code..
@Pavel: In what file is the information saved? Should th GPS connection work on GTA02 that doesn’t use gillin (as far as I know)
Do you have a possibility to try it on GTA02, fix if needed and package it to opkg.org?
So I can save the data with mokomapper and then convert it to OSM format with the mapperdecoder? Is this correct? So should I save the stdout to a file that will be given to mapperdecode? A simple example of the usage of these would be appreciated!
I don’t have gta02 near me, sorry.
No gllin -> you have to save NMEA data with something else. tangogps should work.
Yes, I believe you should redirect stdout to a file, than pass that to mapperdecode. (Unfortunately, I don’t have simple example near me. But the app is really really simple).
Core of the application is these lines:
class OSM(Base):
def point(self, s):
global pointnum
os.system(“echo; date; echo p | nc 127.0.0.1 2947; echo d | nc 127.0.0.1 2947; echo o | nc 127.0.0.1 2947; ( echo j=1opd; sleep 1; echo opd ) | nc 127.0.0.1 2947; echo ‘” + s + “‘; echo p | nc 127.0.0.1 2947 | ( IFS=\”= \” read A B C && echo \”\” ) “)
pointnum = pointnum – 1
…that will read current position from gpsd and store it. The buttons are there to generate records in that file.
Yes, the main menu looks correct on your screen. Pressing the buttons should open submenus, and so on. At the last level, pressing the button will generate record in a file. That’s it, it is a very simple application.
If buttons do not seem to do anything, maybe you don’t see the popup windows? Try going to window list or something, or maybe try running it on the desktop.
@Pavel, ah, okay, I got it and will try it shortly today. Thanks for the help so far!
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My addition to the list:
GPRS multiplexing installed by default. All I want to do is add my connection details (although, in a perfect world, these would be provided with every phone and the default configurations loaded after determining the service provider from the current GSM connection).
Joseph
@Joseph: Kustomizer will do it for you, check http://risto.kurppa.fi/blog/kustomizer-02-for-200812/ GPRS, GPS etc work nice.
Hi Risto, I’ve recently tried Kustomizer and have tried this morning to copy the relevant connection details into the provided file, but haven’t had any luck so far. I guess you’re using the services menu to connect? Mine currently reads: “GPRS is off FAILED”.
I’ll give it another go…
Yes, for some reason it says ‘FAILED’ always, no matter if it really fails or not. Usually when you restart ‘services’ it says GPRS IS ON and shows you the K counter -> something wrong in the mokoservices script. You also can try to connect on command line (gprson, gprsstats and gprsoff). I added this on the wiki page in the ‘Good to know’ -section, see http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Kustomizer#Good_to_know