Someone came up with a fix: add a capacitor.

So we did.

Wiki page with instructions to detect if you’re hit by the bug: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/1024
Bug report: http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ticket/1024
Instructions to fix the bug: http://www.neofundas.blogspot.com/

After opening the case

Small, isn't it?

One end soldered to the ground

Other end soldered to the old capacitor

Thanks Antti & open hardware!

Results

The suspend power consumption dropped to around 6000 µA from around 15-20000µA when I now allow the GSM modem (Calypso) to go to deep_sleep mode. The 1200mAh battery should now give up to 200 hours = 8 days of power. Of course this is theoretical – I also need to use the phone to make calls, let GPS show me my location etc etc – and as I move, the GSM needs to wake up ever now and then because of the changing base stations. So nowadays I recharge it every other night still being able to make calls and do other stuff with it. Nice improvement!

Related posts:

• OpenMoko 2007.2, distro comparison and community
• Kustomizer for Openmoko 2008.12
• The results of the first programming competition for Openmoko phones

Tangogps is a map & gps program for Linux. Tangogps is written by Marcus Bauer and ir runs on devices like Openmoko Freerunner, but also on desktop computers. The channel I started is #tangogps, feel free to join! (Ajax client and Java client)

Smile is a slideshow application for Linux by Stéphane Gibault, see my blog post on Smile. The Irc channel is #smile-slideshow. Join the discussion there! (Ajax client and Java client)

Let the discussion flow!

What’s your experience on these apps? Using Tangogps or Smile? Best things about them?

About IRC – I think the IRC commands are a bit of a pain.. on #tangogps, I first dropped my op rights only to realize that after that I wasnt’ able to register the channel.. So 4 of us had to leave the channel to gain admin rights again.. But I’m learning :)

Related posts:

• Smile – a great photo show software for Linux
• Invitation for all Open Source GPS software developers and users to join FOSS-GPS mailing list
• Freerunner compatible GPS software

It is still unknown if there will be a developer/user community around Wikireader and what will Openmoko do this time better than with Freerunner. You can try to find some answers on the Openmoko community mailing list

Related posts:

• Freerunner compatible GPS software
• OpenMoko 2007.2, distro comparison and community
• Invitation for all Open Source GPS software developers and users to join FOSS-GPS mailing list

Nokia 900

• A great device hardware-wise. Nice to see it running Linux but phone stack still closed. See ‘This is Linux from Finland
• I wouldn’t be surprised it it was already patented, but I think it’s a great idea to zoom in/out by making a circular motion on the touch screen – maybe something Openmoko browsers could use?
• When you turn N900 screen to portrait position it’ll start the ’simple’ phone app – and on landscape it runs the ‘computer’ stuff. A nice idea again!

Paroli

• Work to make it work smoothly on SHR is being done (GREAT job Laszlo!!!), see http://git.paroli-project.org/
• Some UI hacks might be also there soon. I myself prefer having the buttons on bottom of the screen to be always able to see what’s on the screen.
• Waiting to see a working package on SHR to allow easy installation: opkg install paroli

SHR

• Settings is nice, supports stuff from power management to connections to much more, also looks good.
• Phone apps work OK though slow when reading stuff from SIM (-> opimd support, where are you…?)
• I like the buttons at the bottom of the screen – but they could use some rethinking:
  • Most of the time the ‘next’ button (be it new, OK, send) is on the bottom left.
  • Sometimes there’s a close/exit/back button on bottom right, sometimes not. This makes you have to close an app (for example call log) from illume top bar. Not very nice.
  • Now there are 1-4 buttons next to each other (settings: only the quit button, phone log: call/add/numbers/duration)
  • I like the ‘options’ -button of contacts to show more stuff. How about moving ‘new’ there and adding ‘close/back/exit’ on the bottom right?
• A single button to take you to ‘home view’ would be nice – that’s why iPhone has that one HW button.
• Hundreds of contacts in the contacts list makes it a pain to scroll. Some thoughts:
  • The finger scrolling works nice
  • The scrollbar’s too small to use
  • How about starting the view from middle of the list, not from the beginning (to reduce need of scrolling)
  • How about creating jump buttons:
    • Alphabetic, like Paroli does
    • or start/middle/end
• So far SHR’s been the most usable distro I’ve had. People are not complaining about the audio quality, suspend/resume is reliable, nice GUI’s to start GPRS & GPS etc.
• I’d like to be able to adjust the volume during call
• I’d like to see the duration of the call during a call (can I already see it? Don’t know.. :)

Misc

• We’re still waiting to be able to use the accelerometers to silent the phone / answer a call / something. Saw today Mickey started to write accelerometer support for FSO – very nice!

(also have a look at my outdated Openmoko wishlist)

Related posts:

• Great news from the Openmoko Community
• It’s time to contribute to OM2009 & Paroli!
• Openmoko 2008.9 first impressions

To me personally the biggest thing is that Paroli (the telephony app) is being worked on to run on SHR (one of the distros)

Related posts:

• Openmoko Community Updates (Oct 19)
• Openmoko Community Updates (Nov 2)
• Great news from the Openmoko Community

http://thenokiablog.com/2009/08/27/nokia-n900/

http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/

(the downside is the ~high price and there’re chances that some bits of it are still closed)

Related posts:

• Maemo & Openmoko Community Survey results published
• Random Openmoko thoughts
• Smile – a great photo show software for Linux

Community Updates

After Openmoko stopped supporting software development for Openmoko phones and concentrate on producing Freerunner phones and their mysterious ‘project B’, also their support for Community Updates stopped. About a month ago the community took over the task and now the updates are published every second week.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates

Distro poll

There’s a poll open asking you for the distro you use most of your time.

http://doodle.com/sd2c8d8snr23eeqq

Openmoko application showroom

It’s vital for the community to be able to show their coolest apps in an appealing way: screenshot, description, comments etc. Since opkg.org has some major problems, some people got interested in setting up a new site to do this. At the moment the most promising existing platform is apt-portal – and it actually looks very nice and suitable for our needs, and it’s developers are also interested and willing to help Openmoko community.

I believe that a showroom like this will help users to try apps and developers to write apps as they’re able to promote their apps and get comments easily.

https://launchpad.net/apt-portal
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2009-August/thread.html#53484

Run Glamo, run!!

Glamo is the display accelerator of Freerunner. It’s been an annoyance only making our life more difficult and slowing things done – until now: Thomas White started the race against the flow and writes a working driver for it. This means that one day we will have somekind of graphic acceleration on our Freerunners. What’s cool about that? It makes it easier again to impress other people with Freerunner :)

http://losca.blogspot.com/2009/08/kernel-mode-setting-kms-on-neo.html

Paroli running on SHR

After Openmoko stopped financing software development for Openmoko phones, the development of OM2009 (the next Openmoko-distro) and Paroli (phone application) started suffering, as the guys working on those left the office and started to do something else full-time. I’ve personally suffered from this a lot and today I heard something great: Paroli runs on SHR!

This might attract more people to work on Paroli and give it a new boost.

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Paroli
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Stable_Hybrid_Release

One to rule them all..

To me, being able to run Paroli on SHR means that there’re no reasons to keep OM2009 alive, both being Openembedded-based distributions. See the poll, SHR is what people use. We have a One Distro to Rule Them All.

For a sec this might sound bad but I personally like it a lot and have been waiting for it a looong time. Now we have only one distro in the community that everyone can contribute to instead of competing distros. I believe this can now take us far. I only wish this would’ve happened a loong time ago.

Debian of course will never die and I’m happy about it – I also have Debian on my uSD card. Android, QT, OpenWRT and so on will live their own lives but I don’t expect them to be big on Freerunner in the near future.

Conclusions

After some kind of recession (don’t know, maybe they call it ‘Summer’) the community is finally waking up and things start to happen. Can’t wait to see where we’re in 6 months from now!

Related posts:

• Openmoko Community Updates 2009-09-02
• The Lost Openmoko Community
• Openmoko Community Updates (Nov 2)

Anyway, as Paroli is plain black&white (with some small exceptions) and I don’t like it too much so I found an easy way to install nice colourful background images that will just destroy the plain black&white minimalism.

I released some of my photos to be used as Openmoko phone background, see http://www.kurppa.fi/freerunner/bgimages

For step-by-step instructions, check http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Paroli-background and please link your images there for others to use!

Could anyone help me to set this to illume background image too? Maybe even startup image?

Related posts:

• It’s time to contribute to OM2009 & Paroli!
• Great news from the Openmoko Community
• Openmoko Community Updates 2009-09-02

Paroli & Illume on OM2009

As you propably know, the Openmoko 2009 distribution (for Openmoko Freerunner phone) is under development and some testing releases have already been made. I myself consider it a very good start (it actually works as a phone quite well!) and I’d really like to see more people contributing there so I thought I’d point you to some of the most important resources to start testing, running and improving both OM2009 and Paroli, the phone application.

General information

What’s Paroli? How does it look like? See http://www.paroli-project.org/

Installing

To install OM2009 and Paroli, have a look at the instructions at http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Om2009#Installing

Using

To learn how to use Paroli, see http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Paroli#FAQ
Some tips for OM2009 you can find at http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Om2009#Using_OM2009

Contributing

Now we come to the interesting part. There’s something for everyone to do and there are people working hard to enable you to help. Here’s a post from Mirko Lindner, the main developer of Paroli:

Hey there,

A lot has happened over the past couple of months, but most important in my mind has been getting OM2009 out into the hands of the community. When we set the very limited goals of OM2009 we had two goals in mind:

1. Give those members of the community who only wanted a daily phone, a distro they could use
2. Introduce technology that would allow the community to come together and improve on these basics

Community interaction, open development and user driven decision making are at the core of Om2009.

Going forward this will be an effort with the community for the community. The help and support I have gotten from the community over the past couple of days and weeks has been remarkable and I can see things starting to move and slowly coming together. We need more of this!

I invite you to join the effort to make om2009 with paroli the best Om-labeled distribution for the Freerunner.

How can you help?

Test the distro, let us know about bugs you find, or even fix them and send us patches.

Tell us about your experiences using om2009, what should we change, where can we improve?

Paroli has come a long way but it still needs a lot of love and optimizing, so if you are into python or efl, check out the code from git.paroli.org, join #paroli on irc and let’s get crackin’. There is lots of things to do, opimd needs to be integrated and improved, the UI needs polishing, overall speed can be increased etc etc

More into Chat and email? Feel like writing a jabber/irc/xxx or email client that really fits the screen? Or do you know of one? Let’s hear about it.

See a list of proposals on: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Om_2009_get_active and http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Paroli-issues

This device has a lot of potential and we are so close to reaching the far corners, the kernel is in good shape, the framework is doing great and telephony apps such as paroli or the shr suite are steadily improving.

So, get your Freerunner in shape again. Flash it with a nice current distro and let it do what it was meant to do :)

Let’s make Om2009 a community product, something all of us can be proud of and say “we did this”.

Regards,
/Mirko

(source & discussion)

Community driven new theme for Paroli

To give Paroli an extra boost I suggest that we create an alternative theme for Paroli. The one Mirko & OM are writing will work fine but it really wouldn’t hurt to see some new themes. I’m sure there are professional designers and user experts around who could use some of the skills they have and this way also help OM: by making more people interested in using & developing Paroli (at least I first check the ‘Screenshots’ page of a new F/LOSS app I find and often judge based on what I see :)

I don’t know exactly how doable it is. As far as I know, it’s possible to create themes for Paroli. I don’t know what parts can be changed or how to do it but I believe that if people are interested, it’ll all come out nicely: I’m sure someone here knows the good old pen&paper thing (or GIMP or Inkscape :) to design a GUI for Paroli. We add some user experience skills to give it the usability touch. I’m also sure there are people here who know enough about themes and python to implement the template. Maybe we even have people around who can write us a theme switcher?

Creating a theme must not be that hard if it’s well supported in Paroli so I really believe we can do it – together. If you know anything about design, themes or Paroli please share it with us in this thread to encourage others.

Let’s start the discussion here. As soon as something comes up, let’s add it here: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Paroli-themes – let your imagination flow and create mockups to be shared!

Enjoy your freedom!!

r

(source & discussion )

Where to go?

If you are still reading this and didn’t find a suitable site for you to find things to do, let me point you to the hub to start participating to OM2009 and Paroli:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Om_2009_get_active

Also the Openmoko Community mailing list is an excellent place to discuss this – just start your post subject with [OM2009] or [Paroli] – it makes it easier for readers. Also the Paroli Irc-channel ( #paroli at freenode.org) is the place to go if you have any questions about Paroli and #openmoko for general discussion.

Related posts:

• Paroli background images
• Great news from the Openmoko Community
• Random Openmoko thoughts

http://openclipart.org/media/files/ben/9651

We announced a month ago the first programming competition for Openmoko phones. Now it’s time to publish the results!

Three applications participated in the competition: Mokotunes, Neoreader and Gorshplayer. It looks like all projects were more or less one-man shows, this is a bit sad, as so much more could have been accomplished if there were teams. Also, no project is actually trying to really integrate into any of the distributions (i.e. prohibiting suspend while playing, or reading from a common media storage subsystem) — this might be too much given the time constraints, but still we’d love to see any attempts of doing that. But however we’re quite happy to see this many projects participating that have a huge potential to come out as great podcast players.

The source codes and installation instructions can be found at here. The reviews below are written by the jury: Michael ‘Mickey’ Lauer, Marco ‘Treviño’ Trevisan, Aapo Rantalainen and Risto H. Kurppa.

Mokotunes

Mokotunes, written for OM2008.12 by Wilder can be considered just a little more than a nice mockup just now since most part of the core functionalities are not implemented yet. In it’s current state it only shows a kind of “demo” playlist with some buttons for controlling the media reproduction. It looks like time run out for this project — they started with a good software design, but not enough rapid prototyping.

GUI
From the GUI point of view it’s hard to do a consideration. But the interface seems a little slow. Also if it includes only few elements in its list, the scrolling is not so smooth (maybe due to the pixmaps used in the theme!?) so we don’t expect it to be better in a real scenario.

PODCAST MANAGEMENT
No signs visible yet how the management of the podcast feeds and of the downloads is going to be like so it’s too early to comment on this.

AUDIO PLAYER
It’s still too early to say what kind of a player this will be like..

CODE
The code, that mostly presents some skeleton functions, shows that it is a very well written/structured C++/EFL project that uses edje for designing the interface while Gstreamer to play the media (actually impossible due to the missing interface for retrieving the data, but the code for playing seems to be all there!).

FUTURE
Could get pretty nice, if developed further. It could also serve as a good example for integrating EFL + GStreamer in a C++ project. It’s still something of embryonal but the core it already has seems good, and it could be extended to get something of functional one day.

CONCLUSION
Good start, nice code, but still very immature.

Developer: Wilder <blackinblackATlist-ru>
Files & installation instructions

Gorshplayer

Developed for Debian by Chistophe M, it was the only project sent that was working “by default”. Basically the author added a new podcast media importer feature to the existent Neoqplayer/Gorshplayer code. It’s actually pretty polished and a nice app. It doesn’t seem to be written for the Neo though, it’s too slow and the UI doesn’t really fit the device. On a Nokia tablet, it could rock.

It has a nice colourful layout and had about all functionality included we were looking for: podcast player & management GUI & downloading, playing podcast episodes and local media files with playlists etc. And it installs nice now when Aapo created the .deb file.

GUI
The player view is indeed pretty with a colourful background but the usability isn’t so good for two reasons: first of all it is not so finger usable (yes, the buttons are big enough, but there’s no finger scrolling, and double-clicking is hard! Not to mention that the window is too big to be used with a shelf, so it’s made for working in fullscreen), then to add a podcast an user should go into preferences, paste an URL, go in the podcasts list, load a podcast, double-click an item to download, go back to the main window where he can select the media to reproduce. All this is quite annoying. It’s nice that one can use the app to config the file folders.

In the play view the battery display is good if Gorshplayer is used in full screen mode. The display showing the play time would be a great addition.

PODCAST MANAGEMENT
Fetching episode lists works OK though the app doesn’t remember the episodes on the next run without clicking the fetch button. It’s nice that there’s a download progress bar visible, maybe it could be added in the same view with the episode listing?

AUDIO PLAYER
Is able to remember the playlist content, has volume control slider and ‘jump back’ button that allows you to jump back the number of seconds set in the preferences view. For some reason the player has very high cpu requirements -> up to 100% which means that it eventually stops playing the files – only OGG files worked this time.

CODE
The player is written in C++/Qt and that is a very good choice in general, but unfortunately not for the openmoko applications yet. In fact this toolkit doesn’t support by default some finger-friendly features that could improve a lot the usability, and from the user point of view, it is not so easy to be installed in the most part of the distros available natively for the Openmoko devices (also if it works, I’ve ran it also in Om2008). Of course this is not a developer fault, and this player is a very good choice for distros like Debian. Code-wise, it’s ok. The classes are reasonably layed out and seperated. It could have used more of the UI designer, though.

POTENTIAL
It has also some potential and nice features but needs some work to be done. Not new features but.. just some things done better. For example the 70-90% CPU is too high, wonder if it would need a newbackend/something to work ok. We also hope that it will improve making the podcast reproduction a little bit more friendly.

CONCLUSION
Good player, well written, works, but not focused for the podcast playing, not so finger usable, not yet ready for any “telephonic” distro (SHR/OM).

Developer: Christophe M <meumeu1402ATgmail-com>
Files and installation instructions
Gorshplayer website

NeoReader

Neoreader was originally written for SHR by Thomas Roth and Mikael Voss. We had to struggle hard to be able to run it: when we received the code it wasn’t compilable for an Openmoko phone (no problems on PC, instead), however playing a little with the toolchain we got an arm binary. Unfortunately everywhere we’d run this software, it simply crashed when trying to fetch the podcast media. So, if it should be judged only based on its basic functionality, it simply doesn’t work. However there was some idea behind the interface, so after some fixing we got it working.. We were very close to disqualify NeoReader but thanks to Marco, we were able to review it.

But now that we have it up&running: The GUI is unfinished, the frontend/backend cooperation suffers, the app is very unfinished and it was a pain to install. But on the other hand the code impresses and it uses only very little resources, it’s not a problem to use other apps at the same time in 2008.12 when playing a podcast with NeoReader.

GUI
There’s no visual feedback telling that an episode is downloaded but an icon shows downloaded episodes, nice! The buttons are quite big so it’s usable with fingers.

PODCAST MANAGEMENT
Trying to add a new podcast crashes the player (click add a podcast feed -> try to type something -> nothing happens -> click ‘Add Feed’ -> crash.) -> not possible to add a new podcast at the moment, also not possible to remove a feed?

AUDIO PLAYER
Neoreader is only able to play files from podcast feeds. The current version can’t play local music/audiobook files which is a big minus. It has nice 5/30s ff/rew buttons that work very fast. The play gui also has buttons to change the speed of playback to faster/slower. The idea is great, a spoken podcast can be listened much faster than 100% speed -> more efficient podcast listening :) Speedup % would be nice to see as well as the file play time. Volume control slider would be a nice addition, as well as some visual feedback to tell if an file is being played or not.

CODE
Thanks to using ELM, this could be the only app that would really work well on the Neo, if developed further.

Looking at it a little more deeply, we found that it has a kind of C++ core that is used for retrieving the data, parsing the XML, saving the results in a sqlite database (that stores the xml retrieved and associates to them the downloaded podcasts), and controlling the media playing the with mplayer.

All this is quite well done, however around this there’s a C/Elmentary interface that looks quite cool and that is quite well designed, but that is badly written and that doesn’t uses the E-libraries to perform some basic tasks (like downloading the media). This causes that the interface is often blocked while the core is performing some task (like reading from the database or parsing the xml files). The author said that he wrote the reader in few days so we understand why there are so much workarounds around in the code. Of course these workarounds need to be fixed (with the bugs that they bring).

POTENTIAL
At the current state it’s not usable but it can be improved to do the task it’s meant to do. The potential of this application is good since the it already allows to listen multiple podcast sources (that can be added pasting the feed url), saving the selected media in the phone and allowing to listen it lately. All this is doable using a very well finger usable interface. There’s also a nice interface for mplayer, also if it has some speed issues when NeoReader is used in a real device.

Some features we’d like to see in this software (after getting a stable version that should use the e libraries facilities for getting the base task accomplished, of course :P), are a kind of playlist that should show all the downloaded media (per podcast and general), the ability to use an plain file to save the podcast addresses (so it will be easy to share list of podcasts or simply to import them without using the GUI). Also a package for easier installation, completed support for podcast management (add/remove feed) and some more information added (downloading, play time etc) and local music/audio book file support added.

CONCLUSION
The parts that work, seem to work well. Even if it has many bugs, the interface must be improved, and the code cleaned up, it represents ~the best starting point for having a nice podcast player for Openmoko. Good backed, nice elementary GUI but badly integrated with the core, it’s developed for being just a podcast reader and it seems a good first step.

Developers: Thomas Roth <nezzaATymail-com> + Mikael Voss
Files & installation instructions
Neoreader website

And the winner is…

.. the community! We just weren’t able to decide if Neoreader or Gorshplayer was better: at the current state they both have some very strong elements and on the other hand some huge weaknesses so it wouldn’t be fair to decide that one of these is the winner. So we want to congratulate both Neoreader and Gorshplayer developers for the job they did – we decided to split the prize between these two projects. The prize, currently at 344e + a leather Openmoko case, can be seen at Cofundos. Everyone who bidded at Cofundos will be soon sent a message telling them to contact both Neoreader & Gorshplayer authors to get the payment instructions. Please pay 50% of your bid to Neoreader devels and 50% to Gorshplayer devel. Also, if anyone else is interested in rewarding the developers for their work feel free to contact them and ask for the payment details.

We also want to encourage you to participate in these projects to complete the missing features and polish them so that we’ll soon be able to listen to podcasts and audio books with no hassle.

We want to thank everyone who contributed: developers, people who give their money to award the developers, the jury members and everyone who sent us comments and suggestions. Please let us know if you think a competition like this is a good idea to run again, what would you like to see as topics and if you have any other ideas and thoughts about this, please share it with us!

Related posts:

• Announcing the first programming competition for Openmoko phones – UPDATED
• Jury & updated rules for the OM programming competition!
• 9 days left in the programming competition, check the prize!