Community Updates

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NOTE: as FreeRunners are now shipping, it seems less likely that Community Updates will be posted in the form they used to be (as they mostly related to the expected release dates). But Wolfgang Spraul has begun with the Weekly Engineering News.


Even though Openmoko strives to keep the community informed of the development progress, Openmoko does not provide delivery dates. Instead, Openmoko reports the project status here and on the openmoko-community mailing list. Major updates are also sent to the announce mailing list.

You may also wish to take a look at the Neo Freerunner FAQ.

Interested developers may additionally wish to follow the progress on the openmoko-kernel mailing list and the devel mailing list (all mailing lists are available here).

You are invited to add questions or topics you think should be included in the Community Updates by emailing community@lists.openmoko.org or by editing section 2 of this wiki page.

See below for a list of previous updates.


Contents

Current issues

The information below has been collected from various sources, feel free to add questions and comments here.

GPS Performance of the Freerunner

The poor GPS performance on the Freerunner has been traced to an interaction between the microSD card and the GPS unit. A software and a hardware fixes are available, see GPS Problems.

GTA02 battery status

While writing a device driver for the new battery which provides an accurate counter of the charge state of the GTA02, the driver developer discovered that the device driver does not get a reading of the charge state due to a very long response time with only one I/O signal when trying to read the charge state. To be able to read the battery status properly, it has been written that it will be necessary to re-design that part of the GTA02 for hardware version GTA02A5 to use two I/O signals to reduce the response time (one for transmitting commands, one for receiving data?). This was fixed two months ago (see Bug 957).

Delivery of a GSM firmware update for the 3G SIM bug (#666)

A bug in the GSM firmware prevents some USA 3G SIM cards from working properly. The bug has been fixed, but the GSM module is under extremely tight legal protection. We've been informed that everything legal has been agreed upon by all parties regarding the process that would allow you to upgrade your own GSM firmware. All that remains is to get everything signed. Apparently the process of getting things signed takes a few weeks! Meanwhile, we have resolved the difficulties I was having performing the upgrade, and I am now able to upgrade your handsets. Anyone interested in having me do this should contact me at michael@openmoko.org.

SMedia 3362 Documentation & OpenGL ES Drivers

There is an open source kdrive driver being written for the GTA02 which will use hardware to accelerate the XRender extension. While the chip is capable of 3D graphics, no OpenGL ES driver/library is avaliable and OpenMoko developers will not be writing one in the near future (although they have not ruled it out in the long-term).

Documentation for the SMedia 3362 has been promised (see this post). However, this refers to documentation OpenMoko developers will be writing themselves, not the technical documentation SMedia have provided OpenMoko with. The OpenMoko developers had to sign an NDA with SMedia to obtain this documentation and are therefore unable to pass this information on to community developers. (See this post for details)

Power Management on the Neo1973/Freerunner

The current battery life of the Neo1973 and Freerunner is not satisfactory. A lot of changes seem to be necessary to the kernel, drivers and related user-space applications. Hopefully the situation will improve over time.

Previous Community Updates

Retrieved from "http://openmoko.org/index.php?title=Community_Updates&oldid=47115"
Personal tools
NOTE: as FreeRunners are now shipping, it seems less likely that Community Updates will be posted in the form they used to be (as they mostly related to the expected release dates). But Wolfgang Spraul has begun with the Weekly Engineering News.


Even though Openmoko strives to keep the community informed of the development progress, Openmoko does not provide delivery dates. Instead, Openmoko reports the project status here and on the openmoko-community mailing list. Major updates are also sent to the announce mailing list.

You may also wish to take a look at the Neo Freerunner FAQ.

Interested developers may additionally wish to follow the progress on the openmoko-kernel mailing list and the devel mailing list (all mailing lists are available here).

You are invited to add questions or topics you think should be included in the Community Updates by emailing community@lists.openmoko.org or by editing section 2 of this wiki page.

See below for a list of previous updates.


Current issues

The information below has been collected from various sources, feel free to add questions and comments here.

GPS Performance of the Freerunner

The poor GPS performance on the Freerunner has been traced to an interaction between the microSD card and the GPS unit. A software and a hardware fixes are available, see GPS Problems.

GTA02 battery status

While writing a device driver for the new battery which provides an accurate counter of the charge state of the GTA02, the driver developer discovered that the device driver does not get a reading of the charge state due to a very long response time with only one I/O signal when trying to read the charge state. To be able to read the battery status properly, it has been written that it will be necessary to re-design that part of the GTA02 for hardware version GTA02A5 to use two I/O signals to reduce the response time (one for transmitting commands, one for receiving data?). This was fixed two months ago (see Bug 957).

Delivery of a GSM firmware update for the 3G SIM bug (#666)

A bug in the GSM firmware prevents some USA 3G SIM cards from working properly. The bug has been fixed, but the GSM module is under extremely tight legal protection. We've been informed that everything legal has been agreed upon by all parties regarding the process that would allow you to upgrade your own GSM firmware. All that remains is to get everything signed. Apparently the process of getting things signed takes a few weeks! Meanwhile, we have resolved the difficulties I was having performing the upgrade, and I am now able to upgrade your handsets. Anyone interested in having me do this should contact me at michael@openmoko.org.

SMedia 3362 Documentation & OpenGL ES Drivers

There is an open source kdrive driver being written for the GTA02 which will use hardware to accelerate the XRender extension. While the chip is capable of 3D graphics, no OpenGL ES driver/library is avaliable and OpenMoko developers will not be writing one in the near future (although they have not ruled it out in the long-term).

Documentation for the SMedia 3362 has been promised (see this post). However, this refers to documentation OpenMoko developers will be writing themselves, not the technical documentation SMedia have provided OpenMoko with. The OpenMoko developers had to sign an NDA with SMedia to obtain this documentation and are therefore unable to pass this information on to community developers. (See this post for details)

Power Management on the Neo1973/Freerunner

The current battery life of the Neo1973 and Freerunner is not satisfactory. A lot of changes seem to be necessary to the kernel, drivers and related user-space applications. Hopefully the situation will improve over time.

Previous Community Updates