Any Thing Under The Sun: January 2009

Freerunner GPS on Android

Finally able to get GPS working on my Freerunner running Android. Here are the pictures showing my location in AndNav2 application.

Patches are submitted to Koolu. If want to try before here is the patch, this patch is for koolu-1.0 branch.

Labels: Android, Freerunner

Neo Freerunner & Android

I have got my self a Neo Freerunner an opensource mobile platform for a couple of months now. Tried various software options available for freerunner. None of them are stable for a daily phone use. Once initial Android port was made available on FR i have been trying it. I was already into hacking Android for various reasons, so it gave me good reason to try things on FR. One thing I can say is that Android felt better on FR than any other Linux based solution. Major reason I could see the X server, which is a big bottleneck. Qt extended is slightly better still not make good usable phone on FR to me.

Recently I was able bring up the cupcake branch of Android on FR. Lot things needed to patch and audio interface changes were made for which there was no proper porting done (I have a stubbed audio). One the new feature in cupcake is the on screen keyboard which was not that in previous release. This is very much required feature for FR as it lacks any keys other than POWER & AUX.

There seems to be other changes in UI layouts as it seems to try fit layouts for VGA screen of FR. Note that android only supports upto HVGA screen. In previous release it was still HVGA displayed on VGA. I have pictures to share the cupcake on FR below including new on-screen keyboard.

Labels: Android, cupcake, Freerunner

GaTi V0.5 Beta 1

GaTi V0.5 Beta1 brings following changes

Based on DG834GT Firmware v1.02.16
BusyBox has been updated to v1.13.2 with useful tools
Now WOL uses busybox's ether-wake tool
Now udhcpd & udhcpc uses busybox's udhcpc & udhcpd with static leases fix for GT
Rest of all previous features included
Version jumped from 0.3 to 0.5 as 0.4 was not released