Pilppa

NWS-W1 is a service that reads and saves data from the 1-wire devices periodically to log files.
(You can checkout it's sources from http://pilppa.org/gitweb/)
I have now had nws-w1 running now for a while in my buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH router and according to it's logs the temperature finally went over 30 celcius in this summer :-)

loguser@radio:/# cat /plp_sensor_data/0008014c7d09/2012/07/2012-07-30.txt

2012-07-30 00:04:08|21.000
2012-07-30 00:14:10|20.937
2012-07-30 00:24:12|21.125
...
2012-07-30 15:09:39|29.437
2012-07-30 15:19:41|29.562
2012-07-30 15:29:43|29.625
2012-07-30 15:39:51|29.500
2012-07-30 15:49:52|29.875
2012-07-30 15:59:54|30.062
2012-07-30 16:10:02|30.250 !
2012-07-30 16:20:03|30.250
2012-07-30 16:30:05|30.187
2012-07-30 16:40:13|29.812
2012-07-30 16:50:14|29.937
2012-07-30 17:00:16|29.500

I have now been involded full time with http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/N900 for some months and things have really shaped up greatly.
4-5 months ago, the device was running really hot and consumed the battery in couple of hours and one could really not use the device as a phone or send sms messages.

Now we have summer release available at http://repository.maemo.org/meego/n900-de/archive/1.2.0.90.5.20110621.5.DE.2011-06-23.1/images/mg-handset-armv7nhl-n900-ce-stable/
and things are really starting to shape up. This image contains mostly usable version of all important apps like phone, sms sending, emails, browsers, irc, wlan setup, gprs connection setup, etc and the battery will also remain usable about the same time than on Maemo side.
So if you thing that you can not call for me or receive answers for sms messages, it's not intentional, it's just some INTERESTING bug in the N900 hacker edition :-)

Anyway now that I have really used the N900 as a daily phone, I can also pick up and try to fix some annoyences still left. For example while I was tracking one gprs bug,
I needed to use a lot the gprs connection plugin in settings application. Original plugin was fast writeup offering edit boxes for access point name, user name and password.
These 3 fields were course something where average joe would not know the answer.

To help things a little, I ended up adding there a code which allows adding a list of known operators and their access codes to configuration file.
So far I have only added there couple of operators I know, but I expect the list of operators to grow when people start using the new ui and will request to add support for their operator.

I also added the combobox which will contain the selection of all operators added to configuration file. So for now the application will automatically check for which operator
the modem is registered and will fill the required data for access point, user name and password fields automatically. If the required operator data is not yet available in the configuration data, user can still select custom connection
and write the connection specific settings manually in the old way.

For now I am happy for this small improvements, but maybe the next step would be to add support for defining multiple different wlan and gprs connections and then request user to select which connection to use, when ever the system needs access to network.

Good old 2009 just changing to happy new 2010 and I got inspired from discussions from power efficient vdr linux clients in vdr mailign list. So I ended up setting my own blog to be able to write out and publish some pics from my system.

Zotac motherboards for intel atom cpu's are not a new thing as tech test places like Anandtech and and friends tested and praised them already almost one year ago.
But even today they seems to be almost perfect solution for power efficient and small linux vdr client so I followed the suggestions of some other vdr users in mailiong lists and finally bought my own Zotac IONITX-A-E motherboard on last month.

In specs the motherboard provides really and all in all solution for the cpu efficient system, thanks for the integrated nvidia graphics card and vdpay drivers.
And as the model I bought includes also an external power adapter, the case does not need internal PSU.
To save some money, I was planning to buy only the 2 gb memory in addition of the motherboard and then just to recycle old case from the broken video for the system without any fans.
That kind of worked but I was not a perfect solution:

• CPU and motherboard temperature without fans stayed around 60-65 celcius without any special work. The 4 inch fan that came with motherboard was noisy so I did not want to use that one.
• 4 gb usb stick for loading system did not felt fast enough, sometimes I just want to build and develop stuff also in that tv machine.
• Video case was about 50 cm width while the motherboard only required about 20 cm...

So I ended up doing my own case from wood that was left from the house building.

• case: 3 cm thick and about 14 cm width and 42 cm long board used originally for floors. For fire alarm safety I put inside the case also a metal sheet that was left over from the roof of my home.
  So the case inner size is about 22 x 38 x 14 cm.
• fans: 1 x 8 cm quiet fan. So far running with 1800 rpm speed, but I plan to slow down it somehow to half by trying to add some resistor between the fan and motherboard 12 w output.
  The fan was about 3 cm thick so it fitter perfecly to the cover I made to case wall and it's located about 3 cm from the motherboards CPU and GPU cooling system. To opposite direction of the case
  I thrilled some blocks to allow air to flow.
• small & cheap 100 gb sata hard-drive isolated form the case wall with some rubber and taped

System feels quit and currently the CPU and motherboard temperature is about 38 - 42 celcius. As a TV client software I am running Mandriva 2010.0 Linux distribution and own build vdr-sxfe from xineliboutput development stream. With vdr-sxfe the "--video=vdpau" option is still crashing for me for some reason, but even without that the CPU usage stays pretty slow for standard SDTV television steams that we mostly watch in Finland. (I have vdr-1.7.10 running in my server vdr machine). In future I will however start digging out the reason for the crash as VDPAU should provide an almost CPU free watching of HDTV S2 streams in my system.

Mika