Marcin Juszkiewicz

Using BeagleBoard as development platform means lot of cables as I need:

• serial cable
• power cable for BeagleBoard
• USB hub
• power cable for USB hub
• USB Ethernet dongle
• Ethernet cable

So by default my BB setup looks like this (here with B7 version so OTG used instead of EHCI):

I decided that I need to do something with it. The idea was to make simple expansion board which will just gather all components on board connected to BeagleBoard. First sketch was this (without keeping aspect etc — just elements):

I presented it to few people with better electronic experience then mine and got few nice suggestions.

After few days of collecting elements and soldering/glueing I got first version working:

USB Ethernet dongle is glued to PCB, USB Hub needs mounting and it’s power cable has to be replaced by better solution. But the good thing is that I have power, serial, Ethernet connectors on one side without any special cables:

When BeagleBoard is placed on top all what is needed to get it working is connecting 3 cables: power, serial and EHCI:

Audio, S-Video and HDMI connectors are on same way as rest so all cables are in one side:

The problem appears when reversed BeagleBoard has to be mounted on top… I have such one with BeagleBUG extension. Extra distances helps but cables are not so nice then:

Notice that SD card in this config is harder to reach.

Serial cable is twisted but still do job.

Audio and video connectors are easy to reach but on other side of board ;(

Yes… that hub needs replacing — note ugly way of attaching power to it.

Anyway this works and allows me to have all cables in one place instead of jungle of them.

As it can be read in many places Maemo is based on Debian. The problem arrives when someone asks “which version of Debian?”…

The answer is “oldstable” (etch) + parts from “stable” (lenny) + some updates from “testing” (squeeze). But what does it mean for developer?

1. If you maintain Debian packages and want them to build for Maemo5 prepare to refresh your memory for (officially deprecated) Debhelper v5 (Debian uses v7 since Lenny).
2. If you use Debconf then you are out of luck rather — 1.4.70 is not even from Etch…
3. If you use Subversion then do not even try to touch repositories which you will checkout under scratchbox — 1.4.3 from Etch is too old for working with repos fetched with today’s 1.6.x versions.

For me it looks like they just refreshed Maemo from OS2007 times again and again and again without considering rebasing on newer release. But why?

On #maemo-devel channel I got answer that this was probably due to sticking with crap^Wscratchbox which has that old stuff. But moment…. Maemo is product made by Nokia, big company with big money, so why no one got paid to update it to at least Lenny?

Good that Mer people use quite recent Ubuntu as a base for their distribution which should make development for it easier (ignore fact that there is very small user base). But this project needs lot of love still.

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.

What will next firmware release for N900 brings? That is common question asked by too many people. Some of them wants impossible things, some wants magic, some mention realistic things. But what really will be included? That’s other story…

I can write what I found in bugtracker (numbers at the end are internal build numbers):

• bug 3675: backup will loop nearly infinitely for directories containing pairs of symlinks that do not point to descendants because backup is following them — 2009.47-5
• bug 3728: Modest reports email username / password incorrect when it is correct — 2009.43
• bug 3762: Performance is unusable on IMAP accounts with a large number of messages in one or more folders (e.g. INBOX) — 2009.46-16
• bug 4851: libosso assumes that all ARM platforms has VFP instructions. — 2009.50-5
• bug 4917: wdgt_va_full_12h_time, wdgt_va_12h_hours should be replaced by wdgt_va_full_12h_time_am/wdgt_va_full_12h_time_pm and wdgt_va_12h_hours_am/
• bug 4976: Add option in modest to add/not add new contact when replying to mail — 2009.50-7
• bug 5161: Fix some compilation warnings in GNOME version — 2009.46-16
• bug 5309: Don’t show “Update All” if no updates are available — 2009.45-14
• bug 5314: Easy to enter ~ ^ ‘ ` ” symbols with 3rd row of special character view — 2009.44-5
• bug 5315: 3 Mobile SIM card rejected — 2009.47-20
• bug 5341: Can’t disable email notification - makes notification unusable if you receive lots of mail — 2009.50-7
• bug 5343: “More…” applications launcher does’t allow scrolling — 2009.44
• bug 5347: address book cannot import vcards from benq/siemens phones properly — 2009.47-17
• bug 5384: Confusing empty window shown after deleting unavailable catalogue — 2009.45-14
• bug 5388: Allow keyboard input to jump to an entry in a list (“type ahead”) — 2009.51-8
• bug 5413: microb doesn’t trigger onchange — 2009.46-2
• bug 5415: Contact widgets move to active desktop after merge — 2009.45-8
• bug 5493: When ISO sensitivity is set to automatic, ISO EXIF value in resulting image is 0 — 2009.47-17
• bug 5505: DTMF tones are not sent through SIP — 2009.43-2
• bug 5518: Bluetooth DBUS UI dialogs - wrong args in the example code — 2009.47-5
• bug 5523: High latency between UI and SIP events being sent — 2009.45-7
• bug 5527: Page is not rerendered when JavaScript actions increase page length — 2009.46-9
• bug 5545: Artifacts (visual noise) when tapping screen in Screen Calibration — 2009.46-16
• bug 5597: First Synchronization between N900 and Exchange 2003 Server always fails — 2009.49-5
• bug 5601: libsdl: Task switcher area can be a dead area — 009.47-17
• bug 5602: IP address field in WiFi advanced settings partially hidden (“Recuperar automáticamente direccíon IP” string too long) — 2009.44-5
• bug 5603: Vertical photos from other devices should fill more space when shown in portrait. — 2009.43-2
• bug 5605: “Already at minimum / maximum font size.” not translated — 2009.44-5
• bug 5607: Call forwarding settings not being saved — 2009.46-5
• bug 5626: Button style in Bluetooth file receive applet is wrong — 2009.47-5
• bug 5633: No hint that it is impossible to paste an strings containing non-numeric characters into a phone number field — 2009.44-5
• bug 5676: Audio does not sync with video (and is ultimately unsyncable) — 2009-44.4
• bug 5687: “Update” progress bar pane misaligned — 2009.45-14
• bug 5688: Improve zooming — 2009.46-9
• bug 5694: Application Manager moves to background after start when quickly clicking — 2009.46-5
• bug 5725: docpurge is not aware of /opt — 2009.46-7
• bug 5744: Volume slider doesn’t notice when you plug in headphones — 2009.45-7
• bug 5761: Bluetooth GPS reconnect dialog refuses to go away after clicking “No” — 2009.47-5
• bug 5768: Inconsistent layout on similar Sharing/VOIP applets — 2009.45-7
• bug 5857: Inconsistent keyboard behaviour when configuring a static ip address — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 5868: Games do not respect master volume (“sound effects” enabled though) — 2009.51-5
• bug 5870: Long emails can’t be read - distorted output on screen after scrolling — 2009.50-7
• bug 5879: Media player track search only matches the beginning of title/artist — 2009.42-9 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 5911: Shaking device switches between landscape and portrait modes — 2009.47-9
• bug 5945: URL proposals in browser disappear after some hours — 2009.50-7
• bug 5948: N900 needs to be rebooted if media player fails to play video (h264dec) — 2009.45-7
• bug 5972: Race condition with hardware shift key — 2009.46-7
• bug 5993: Home view blurs on triple-tapping the launcher grid icon — 2009.47-17
• bug 5998: Skype does not allow entering DTMF tones — 2009.44-2
• bug 6004: N900 sometimes ignores USB data cable — 2009.46-16
• bug 6017: Clicking the dashboard icon highlights it but does not open the dashboard — 2009.51-8
• bug 6039: Hanging application menu requires system reboot — 2009.46-5
• bug 6060: Application manager finishing an installation in background blocks keyboard input — 2009.51-8
• bug 6100: The menu item “copy” in the browser menu does not work — 2009.46-2
• bug 6107: Background image settings not restored — 2009.43-9
• bug 6138: Skype Support>Report problem leads to an error page — 2009.47-17
• bug 6139: skype: Call does not support DTMF tones — 2009.47-17
• bug 6203: Rotation in 42-11 is not as smooth as in 41-10 for some third party apps — 2009.47-23
• bug 6261: Delete dialog text missing a space — 2009.42-5 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 6268: The required #include directives are not documented for Hildon — 2009.51-8
• bug 6269: Can’t reuse the name of a bookmark that has been deleted — 2009.50-7
• bug 6349: New email notification leads to blank email instead of email itself — 2009.47-23
• bug 6361: ‘base’ and ‘more’ applications are visible sametime (messed) — 2009.51-8
• bug 6470: Charger not recognized when plugged in when in Touch & Key lock — 2009.42-2 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 6530: Drops WLAN connection to Linksys WRT610N after 10-15 minutes — 2009.48-5
• bug 6544: USA localization displays distance in kilometers — 2009.49-2
• bug 6570: Double-tapping “Inbox” sometimes opens ‘empty’ Inbox — 2009.46-16
• bug 6612: File manager fails to show folder sizes beyond 999,9 MB — 2009.45-14
• bug 6622: nokia messaging doesn’t synchronize selected imap folders — 2009.45-7
• bug 6669: Browser window checkerboards and repaints when navigated to from multi-task view — 2009.47-5 probably fixed it
• bug 6675: after failed pairing to bluetooth car kit bluetooth can’t be turned on — 2009.51-0
• bug 6752: Low power/battery beep does not sound if you’re on a call — 2009.46-5
• bug 6770: Can’t delete route waypoints in Map application — 2009.47-1
• bug 6771: Currently active connection should be first in Connections list — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 6792: FM radio transmitter does not play while USB cord is connected — 2009.51-5
• bug 6807: Wrong default region in E-mail accounts dialog — 2009.48
• bug 6811: Incorrect entries in the Birthday Smart Calendar — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 6877: Pin / lock code entry dialog reveals digits on backspace — 2009.43-9
• bug 7027: Changing to next week is very slow — 2009.42-7 (not included in 42-11)
• bug 7067: gtk-icon-theme-name unset — 2009.43-5
• bug 7073: Changing password on Exchange 2007 makes MfE go crazy — 2009.42-5 (not included in 42-11)

Impressive list isn’t it? I have to admit that this shows me one thing — integration of Maemo5 in OpenEmbedded will be done sooner then later. Why? Because I want to get such stuff as fast as possible without waiting for official firmware releases.

Will all those bug fixes end in next firmware? No idea as this is not granted:

(Note: 2009 is the year, and the number after is the week.)

A future public update released with the year/week later than this internal build version will include the fix. (This is not always already the next public update.)

Please verify that this new version fixes the bug by marking this bug report as VERIFIED after the public update has been released and if you have some time.

To answer popular followup questions:

• Nokia does not announce release dates of public updates in advance.
• There is currently no access to these internal, non-public build versions.

And one more thing — xulrunner 1.9.2 (version used by Firefox 3.6-pre) was tested on N900 and may land in one of next releases (rather not first one).

I just released sources of my Protracker module player. What this application is and what it can do you can read in one of my older posts: I wrote module player in Qt.

What are features:

• UI created with Qt Designer (so it is easy to change if you want)
• separate UI for desktop and other for Maemo5 (automatically selectable during build)
• Maemo5 uses 3 stacked windows just like UI Style Guide requires
• uses Phonon to play (with GStreamer modplug plugin underneath)
• fetching modules from modland archive
• author/song selection
• playing next song on song end (with looping on author)
• seeking (works only in desktop version — bug reported for Maemo5 version)

Things to do:

• error handling (especially fetching related)
• moving of download progressbar to QDialog
• playing counters
• favorites
• playlists

Everything licensed under LGPL v2.1 — same license as Qt uses. That because I used many Qt examples as base for my application.

How to get it? I made repository on Gitorius server — go there, fetch, try, comment, share improvements.

As I have my Nokia N900 from DDP I have just one week to test does everything works properly — after that I am on my own.

So far I checked:

• microphone by doing some GSM calls. This also shown that GSM modem works for voice.
• GPRS data connections — from EDGE to HSDPA (did not checked speed)
• WiFi connections
• Bluetooth connections — synced PIM data from my Nokia E66 phone, used headset for calls
• FM transmitter — played some children songs today during driving with my daughter
• FM receiver — “FM Radio” application from repository works and plays (app still need work)
• TV-Out — playing movies on CRT and LCD television sets
• screen — to bad that I found bad pixels… but good that they are now not later
• headphones — just included ones
• USB charging and storage access modes
• normal charging (included charger and standard Nokia one)
• keyboard — works, things could be better
• SIM slot — my card works but slot itself feels cheap and reminds me one from Openmoko phones. I hope that they will get rid of it in next devices — my E66 has better one.
• microSD slot — works with 8GB card but mechanically it is disaster. Prefer to not use it too often as it can break.
• main camera — nice photos
• front camera — complete disaster… Now I know why there is no video calls. hint: install “Mirror” application
• internal storage

My feelings after first days? Hardware is nice and (as usual) there is a space for improvements:

• SIM slot should be changed to sliding one — current one can break too easily
• microSD slot also should be sliding one — look at Nokia E66 for example
• give fullscreen button back
• battery cover should be thicker so device will not bounce on camera when left on table
• move microusb to right and headphones to left side of device
• move lock slider to left side (so it will be top when one hand operated)

I hope that I did not missed anything on list of things to check. I excluded Irda from it because I do not know is it supported at all.

UPDATE: Eugene Antimirov posted that his N900 from DDP has a problem with playing videos — bug 6823.

Tomorrow I will send my Nokia N900 back to Nokia.

But I am not abandoning that platform. It is just because my N900 has few dead pixels on screen. They are grouped in area of “task switcher” button so were harder to notice.

Are those bad pixels or just dust? No difference for me as in both situations they are visible.

I plan to write blog post on each working day about my experiences with N900 device. Today I planned to concentrate on PIM applications but decided to write about other things.

Brainstorm

Brainstorm — the person which invented that was genius. In normal projects if someone wants to request enhancement then bug tracker is used. Bugzilla even has such value in severity field. What is a result?

Bug like this, this or that got “moved” to brilliant Brainstorm area of Maemo website. Ok, you can add idea of solution there or vote for (or against) that. But you can not comment on solutions or ideas. For some entries in brainstorm there were comments with “discuss that idea in this forum thread” but seriously — how many developers like to use forums? I do not like — prefer to get email notifications from bug trackers where I can comment on bug and vote for it. I can quickly search for all entries where I commented etc. Brainstorm does not give me that. But I do not know, maybe the idea was to make users shut up and be happy with software which they got.

UI

Maemo5 UI is slick, nice and finger friendly. Last thing also means that most of screen resolution is used for paddings, margins and frames. Basically do not expect more then 6 lines on list widgets.

Kinetic scrolling of course is present but also scrollbars are hidden so most of time it is hard to notice how many entries are available. Problem is even bigger when layout object is scrollable — it took me some time to find out where I can change ringtones to the ones which I used on previous phones (I use same ones for over two years). The problem was this screen:

There are options under them… but no visible mark that user should scroll ;( It was discussed in bug 5750 and bug 5426 but for me it looks like it will not be fixed.

Portrait mode would improve things a lot but is not available and looks like will not done for Maemo5 (except few applications). Contacts list in phone dialer (the only one portrait enabled app) contains 10 entries. Kinetic scrolling works much better in that orientation and user got also alphanumeric shortcuts to scroll list even faster (due to lack of keyboard in portrait).

To summarize: UI is nice, but some work should be done to make it more useful.