The end of 2009 is ended. Was it good year? For me it is hard to tell…
January
- got Atmel AT91SAM9263-EK — my first own developer board. I used it to test most of my images during 2009.
- moved Zaurus to drawer — no need for it anymore as I have better platform to test stuff on (ok, VGA > QVGA but on-board ethernet is nicer then wifi)
February
- FOSDEM — this year I was there and as always it was worth to be there.
- got own branches on Poky Linux git server to get easier way to contribute
- Koala Nano PC joined my devices and started discussion “is hdparm good for testing devices”. Now I know that it was not good choice. Maybe one day I will run better set of benchmarks.
- offered serial cables for BUG device for free — sent few during year. Now new BUGbase uses iPod connector so Handylink cables are useful only for JTAG.
- played a bit with syncing mobile devices and failed. OpenSync really needs new stable release.
March
- celebrated 5 years of working with OpenEmbedded — quite long time since Zaurus SL-5500…
- new interesting devices appeared on a market. I was considering buying TouchBook but after playing with 8.9” netbooks decided against — I need bigger keys.
April
This was month of getting new toys:
- bought Citroën C3 car. Small one this time.
- BeagleBoard B7 arrived and got small case. I never finished it because I have 3 BB now.
- AVR32 powered Atmel NGW100 was next.
- then I found Cirrus Logic EDB9301 covered by dust in my friend’s office. Crappy board but it gave me possibility to hack on toolchain a bit when I was merging EP93xx changes from Martin Guy. And due to that I got Sim.One board few months later.
And they forced me to do some hardware updates:
- replaced my multi I/O card with other one — lost parallel port, gained 4 additional serials.
- bought and adapted 200W ATX PSU to power all those devices
May
- sheevaplug arrived — now it is my BitTorrent, IRC, Samba, NFS server. And of course it runs Ångström not Ubuntu (which was preinstalled). Friend recently shown me his industrial adaptation of sheeva — amazing stuff.
- wrote my (rather negative) opinion on Nokia N900 — did not know that they will offer me discount.
June
- LinuxTAG — this year I won BeagleBoard from Texas Instruments.
- Palm Pre SDK has leaked and I took a look at it under Linux (by copying from MS Windows environment). Some time later they released newer version which worked better under Linux.
- played a bit with netbooks/laptops and tried to write some kind of summary of things which define good laptop. Still use my Dell D400 anyway.
- merged EP93xx toolchain updates into OE — prefer to not having to do toolchain adaptations
July
- got offer from ST-Ericsson company to give a talk during their workshop
- wrote summary of my thoughts about Contacts application — Maemo5 has is quite nicely done but still many things from my post are not there.
- updated my Atmel board to 2.6.30 kernel and got everything (except CAN bus) working. It was nice improvement.
- hacked Connman UI for QVGA as we use it on a BUG and original version was not usable. Whole work done by changing GTK+ application when I never spent time on learning how it works.
August
- NHK-15 board arrived from ST-Ericsson. It is nice board with interesting features. Too bad that there is no kernels newer then 2.6.20 for it (to make full use of it).
- T-Com W500V arrived — I bought it to have VoIP functionality with normal analog phone. Need to move it to my room probably as it is too unstable to be used over WiFi :(
September
- Finally we found time for some vacations and visited my parents. It was nicely spent time.
- new BUGbase available worldwide — this one has WiFi, Bluetooth inside so not need for BUGwifi module. And no more HandyLink as iPod connector took it place. Too bad that BUGdock is not possible to buy (FCC not certified etc).
- got third BeagleBoard — this time from Texas Instruments Germany. I think that I won it during LinuxTag.
October
- I am officially OpenEmbedded e.V. member now
- Embedded Linux Conference Europe took place in Grenoble, France. I was invited by ST-Ericsson company as their guest. Had a talk about “Hacking with OpenEmbedded” which had good audience and discussion.
- ST-Ericsson Community Workshop was one day before ELC-E. I had a long talk about Poky Linux and OpenEmbedded in relation to NHK-15 board.
- on last evening in Grenoble I got email from Quim Gil about Nokia N900 discount. Too bad that it was not day before as I met few people with this device during ELC-E.
- wrote small note about using packages on embedded systems — it is really easy and takes lot of things from todo lists.
- changed theme on blog to Carrington one
November
- OEDEM 2009 took place is Cambridge, UK. We had OpenEmbedded e.V. meeting, discussed many things and this time we sent summaries of it quite fast.
- Richard Purdie released new version of Poky ‘pinky’ which included all changes done by BugLabs company. Most of them were written by me or cherry-picked from development version of Poky or OpenEmbedded.
- Got new client and as they are using Poky I am back on Poky Linux development again.
- After 8 years of no new apps development I started Protracker module player using Qt. One source works on my desktop and under Maemo5 SDK. Still need to finish it and create new UI for tablet devices as normal one is not usable.
- Got Sim.One board — EDB9301 moved to deprecated.
- Ordered Nokia N900 from DDP — got it after 4 weeks.
- Played a bit with Maemo5 SDK to check how Maemo5 look and how people are supposed to develop for it. Scratchbox sucks totally.
December
- Nokia N900 arrived and I have to admit that it is quite nice device. Software is not so nice — already filled some bug reports.
- After few days of playing I sent N900 back to DDP — there were bad pixels on screen.