So last night I got around to setting up my development enviroment again and built a kernel based on the gsm raphael’s progress so far. haret loads into ram and completes the jump, it’s unknown where we hang as is. Everything need to be done still! More to come, though I’m sure for started I need to get my virtual bootloader location, virtual and physical framebuffer pages, and all the gpio’s…
So it appears no one has started a cdma android port yet. I will be beginning this myself as of saturday (possibly starting a bit after work tomorrow!). So if anyone has been looking at this themselves yet please contact me (irc.freenode.net:#shadowmite) and we’ll work on it together… Same network #htc-linux is pretty active as well. I welcome all comments and suggestions. I’ll link in a forum thread here once this gets going.
Also a small update, cmonex has helped deliver a complete rebased SPL to run as sspl now, so hardspl’s will go public pretty soon (as soon as she and olipro are happy with a few odd’s and in’s).
The Sprint HTC Touch Pro is finally upon us. The wait has been over a year for those of us in the know. As of this past week there was certainly some entertaining news at ppcgeeks with a user (criticalaudioinc) claiming to work at a repair facility being contracted by HTC. While nothing is certain, I certainly believe that the options are that:
A) He is in fact a manager who cant spell or type or reason rationally
or B) He was just lying about what he thought he could sticking to the rumored details of release.
Regardless he stated on the night of 23rd the phones where “shipped” yet best buy goofed on their “street date” launch of the 26th and started selling on the 24th. So think what you will for that guy (did I mention he claims his tech “swapped a radio board from a cdma diamond to a gsm touch hd”?).
The phone regardless of the schenanagans to it’s launch is amazing. It is the first phone to finally fulfill every tech desire I have had. Including VGA screen, wifi, bluetooth, accelerometer, stylus sensor, capactive sensors, 5 row fold out keyboard… More to come in updates, Depending on the speed at which others get to this device will determine my level of involvment in the inital hacks.
For now I leave you with the best advise, if you want one, sign up for best buy rewardzone (free), get the 20% off statement on the website printed, go to the store and get one for $255 after tax! Only valid till 11/1 however.
Spymongoose and myself will be in Las Vegas for Defcon this year, hope to see some of you there. We might be spending some time in the badge hacking and robots areas, and a lot of the sessions.
I have a good source of info that it appears the iPhone 2 will be sporting a Qualcomm chipset and is in fact thinner as the newer rumors say…
We’ve gotten several people asking about the WEEGEE board and what it is and why we built in. I’ll try to answer that here. First off, it’s a single board computer specifically built as a wireless robot computer. In other words, it’s destined to be the brain in any robot or electronic design that needs to use 2 normal DC motors.
Now why would you use this instead of a Handyboard or a cricket etc? The motor drivers in all other board on the market can only handle pathetic small motors with 1A max current, only 600ma on some of them! We found this unacceptable, there are a lot of cheap motors out there (for instance the ones in Tamiya’s Dual gear box) which just can’t be used without a more capable driver. As such a lot of people buy secondary motor controllers boards for high prices. With the WEEGEE board that’s no longer needed, we built in a full size H-bridge capable of driving up to 3A motors normally, and even more if you add some extra wire to increase the amps they can draw and beef up a heatsink. (The components are rated up to 8A).
In addition our board uses the MaxStream XBEE wireless radio’s. As such anything you build with this can be wirelessly tethered to a computer, or to other XBEE devices including other WEEGEE boards. IE, swarm mode robotics. You can flash your new program code wirelessly to the AVR! You can stream pictures back to a monitoring computer… In short, we added this aspect as we liked the SRV-1’s wireless capability and wanted that without the added bulk of a entire embedded computer running linux which you have to code around.
Using the ATMEGA644P we have 2 serial ports available so while the wireless is using the first port, we have the second port available for a camera module or anything else you want to use it for. We will soon demonstrate using a serial controlled camera.
We also are adding a SD expansion board which will sit right on top of the current weegee board using the 6 pin ISP port. This will allow mass storage for the pictures, mapping, or whatever you need it for. And with future software coding it will be possible to use the SD for program memory!
Please let us know what you think and give us any suggestions you might have.
Our informant dropped by again, this time with some more details. While the information is sketchy at best, and this devices prototype status makes the information even less solid. However, this is what we got:
For ongoing information and discussion, see this thread: http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=164889
Someone stopped into our chat room today with this to show us:
Its a CDMA WM Treo 800, but according to our source in the Ukraine it is also known as the Palm Zeppelin. More details will follow, as we are unsure of the pixel count on the screen as well as several other important details. The one little fact that was mentioned was that it does not use a mini USB plug but rather a micro USB.
So a little bit back spymongoose, eeprom7777 and myself received our first prototype WEEGEE 1.0 PCB’s and we of course went nuts getting them together quickly. It’s actually a little disturbing how quickly we found a few things here and there we want changed. Needless to say, we’ve moved our design up to WEEGEE 1.1 now although nothing has been ordered for production yet. We need your input! If you want a WEEGEE board or are interested in what they can do, please head over to the WEEGEE forum and talk with us!
I’m putting up a huge picture of a prototype here, link only, modem users beware, this is a big picture.
http://www.shadowmite.com/img/Weegee1.0.JPG
The current changes we are making include a extra serial port, twice as much program memory/ram, and some extra options. Also we’ve reduced the size a bit as seeing it in person we were able to find the areas that could be reduced without effecting the design much.
For the WEEGEE 1.1 (our first hopeful production release) we are also going to be including a SD Daughterboard option to open up the possibilities for a few things. Namely we intend that extra serial port to go to a camera in the near future, and the sd card to be for mass storage of pictures or mapping data. The other possible use is if we write a simple interpretter of some kind our board will suddenly have the ability to have 2 gigs and up in program and memory space!
As for functionality of the 1.0 units, they have proven our design works, the H-Bridges are absolutely amazing and allow motors that were never an option with any of the other boards out there with built in motor drivers. I have recently finished adapting code to allow over the air firmware flashing for the mcu making this a truely sweet project.
What is it?
The WeeGee board is a joint project from Spymongoose and Shadowmite of shadowmite.com.
8-Bit Atmel microcontroller with ISP port (running at 7.3728MHz)
16 easy access digital IO with Handyboard style connectors
8 of those can additionally be used as analog
1 Extra open serial port (4 pin header) (first is used for XBEE Wireless)
2 Built in H-Bridges capable of motors with up to ~3A draw (depending on heat sink used up to 8A)
X-Bee 2.4gHz Wireless Link on board complete with reset and sleep control from the AVR
3 Additional IO lines can be used from the ISP port if needed
Additional 2 IO lines from AVR + 8 from X-Bee available in non wired port under X-Bee
Those are shared with the LED and Piezo buzzer.
On/Off physical switch on main
Minimal power usage when X-Bee and AVR are in sleep mode
3.3V Logic used throughout
