Kate Alhola's Forum Nokia Blog

Nokia will have strong participation in aKademy 2008. Nokia is the platinum sponsor for the event. We have had a strong particiarion in GTK/Gnome community and now we would like to create similar position in Qt/KDE Open Source community and catalyst many Opeopen Source Qt projects for our Internet tablets. There will be multiple maemo related presentations. Kate Alhola and Antonio Aloiso will have a presentation "Adapting Qt for maemo hildon". We try arrange also other presentations like how to develop Qt applications to devices running maemo and how to design mobile UI to Qt/KDE applications, maemo devroom/workshop etc. If you have good ideas or have already made Qt applications for internet tablets, please let us know.

The aKademy will be also a launch event for maemo/hildon Qt port. The port is developed in open source fashion. You can download current snapshot from qt4 maemo garage page.

The Akademy will be a good place to meet maemo/Qt/KDE developers and to start developing your application for internet tablets.

Nokia will be also hiring Qt specialists, please look http://www.nokia.com/imaginemaemo or contact Jakub Pavelek or Carlos Guerreiro to addresses which are in format forename.surnane@nokia.com.

FreeDroidz

It is one month since LinuxTag but i like to share some cool favourities from there. The LinuxTag was great showplace for many open source projects. In Tarent booth there was demo for Freedroidz project . The Freedroidz are Lego Mindstorm based robots that can be controlled with Nokia Internet tablet with Jalimo Java package. It shows how tablets can find many new innovative areas of use. It looks like tohaving lot of interesting fun to give for both adults and children. 

LinuxMCE

Other interesting application running in maemo internet tablet was LinuxMCE . You can find client for maemo from pluto-nokia pages from garage  The combines control of the media, home automation and even ip telephony together. You can use your tablet to be general remote control device to control  our Home Theatre, lights, heating or even watch security camera. If you like make very cool StarTrek style house, you can attach some tablets as wall control units in to the rooms. That's not at all so insane idea if you compare prices of tablets to the many home automation systems. I will tell more when i got my system running.

BeagleBoard

The Beagleboard  is another cool device. It is small TI Omap3 based board, running full Linux and using just milli wats to couple of wats power. That's magnitudes less than any PC uses. The Beagleboard CPU belongs in same TI Omap family than our Internet Tablet CPU  so you should be able to use maemo SDK with it. I even saw picture that someone already hacked hildon desktop running on it. I have not yet been able to try but hopefully soon. It is easy to find lot of applications to this small energy efficient embedded board.

Maemo with QEMU

If you like to run all maemo, not only user mode applications unde QEMU, there is good instruntions Marcin Juszkiewicz blog

In LinuxTag Nokia released some new facts about future of maemo.
After the soon to be released Diablo release we are going to have releases
with codenames Fremantle and Harmattan. You can find full release in 
Quim Gil's slide set .

The this presentaion gives lot of answers for the hottest maemo
question, Qt or GTK .  The Fremantle will still be GTK+ based release
and Harmattan will give Qt support. The all important but invisible
maemo framework technologies like Dbus, Gstreamer, Telepathy, X11,
Bluez  or debian packing will remain there.

Even though Qt support is coming in Harmattan release, it does mean that
maemo developers should wait so long until able to develop
Qt applications for Nokia tablets. There is already garage.maemo.org
project Qt4 for maemo that runs in current Chinook
release. The current release lacks some important maemo integration
features like maemo input method or maemo menus support but I think
that we will see them there soon. Nokia will support this community
efford to bringing Qt as soon as possible to maemo developers.
 

I will be participating Open Source in Mobile USA conference in San Francisco.

If you are maemo developer or like to to be one, just come and chat with us. If you have any technical  issues in your mind or you like to talk how Forum Nokia can help you developing maemo applications come and talk with me.

If you like chat with Quim Gill from Nokia internet tablet product management, he will be there also.

We have reserved meeting room called "Lombard" for Wednesday 12th and we have also some small snack there. 

Nokia Internet tablets are volume produced, low power consumption devices that are designed to be enough rugged that they can last as mobile devices. Even they are designed to be used as Internet communication devices, thay are also excellent for controlling embedded devices.

This is my presentation in Fosdem 2008,Brussels  about Controlling embedded devices aith maemo Internet Tablet Fosdem_maemo_2008.pdf

Internet tablets have many advantages like price, rugged design and small power consumption compared to both PC-based or special embedded hardware based designs. They have also new challanges because they does not have so wide selection of interface options. 

Some examples of embedded controll projects using Internet tablet is Small aircraft Glass cockpit, Home Automation, Accelleration sensor interface, maemo puppy robot or Carman car data terminal. 

In N800/N810 you have basically three interface options Wlan, Bluetooth and USB. All of these optios require with some rare exeptions separate embedded processor or microcontroller to controll I/O box.

Wlan is fast and versatile but requires in practice multichip embedded controller running Linux.  Good example  is to (mis)use  Wlan routers with  Openwrt

In small series Bluettoth and microcontroller module may be more costly than wlan router.  

The USB is most practical way to expand tablet I/O capabilities. Microcontrollers with USB-device interface price start from some tens of cents to few Euros. USB-device needs something around hundred lines of the code in the microcontroller.

Two easiest ways to connect USB microcontroller to Internet tablet is to use libusb or make device emulationg USB serial converter. In N8xx musb driver has certain limitations that may need some workarounds. 

Kate Alhola and Teemu Sorvisto from Forum Nokia, Nokia professional developers organization will be in Fosdem . If you have questions, ideas or proposals memo application developing, please come and talk to us.

I have in presentation " Controlling embedded devices with the Maemo internet tablet" in Sunday morning 10.00 in embedded in Embedded developer room AW1.126 .

This is the second part of the USB saga, this is little bit more in deep technical aspects. The next part will then have USB-O-The Go statusbar plugin that will automatize most of hard hand work explained here.

 here are two possible ways to connect N810 tablet to network via USB.  One is to use USB host mode and USB ethernet adapter and the other is USB slave mode using ethernet gadget driver.

Here are the basic instructions about USB slave-mode networking on maemo.org web pages http://maemo.org/development/documentation/how-tos/4-x/setting_up_usb_networking.html .

The basic setup in USB networking is Linux computer and N810 are connected to each other with a normal USB cable. Using g_ether driver tablet emulates USB networking device isntead of the FAT memory card. USB networking is very useful in many ocassions where WLAN is not availale or usable.  

These above mentioned instructions lack some important things. This setup does not work with browser or does not set up dns server address. It also supports only one tablet connection to server.

To be able to use browser, you need to create a dummy IAP so that browser does not ask you to open wlan/bluetooth connection.  You can do this entering to su prompt in terminal window command:

gconftool -s -t string /system/osso/connectivity/IAP/DEFAULT/type DUMMY

resolv-file=/tmp/resolv.conf.usb0
resolv-file=/tmp/resolv.conf.eth0

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp 
auto usb0
iface usb0 inet static
        address 192.168.2.15
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.2.14

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual
up  /sbin/udhcpc -i eth0 -s /etc/udhcpc/udhcpc.script
auto usb0
iface usb0 inet manual
up  /sbin/udhcpc -i usb0 -s /etc/udhcpc/udhcpc.script 

To use your USB networking, you can should use methods descripted in maemo.org documentation

insmod /mnt/initfs/lib/modules/2.6.21-omap1/g_ether.ko
ifup usb0 

Next uou need to setup your Linux server.  To deliver dhcp address to tablet and have needed bridging functionality you shoud issue following command, in this example, in Ubuntu gutsy: 

apt-get install bridge-utils dhcp

iface usb0 inet manual
up brctl addif br0 usb0

iface usb1 inet manual
up brctl addif br0 usb1

 subnet 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.2.20 192.168.2.250;
  option domain-name-servers 192.168.2.1;  
  option routers 192.168.2.1;
  option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
}

brctl addbr br0
ifconfig br0 192.168.2.1
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j MASQUERADE
dhcpd br0

Now you should have everything set up, just plug your tablets in USB ports of your server and test with ping that connection works.

USB Host mode networking

maemo kernel for N810 has build in driver for Realtek RTL8150 based USB network adapters. To use them you need to use USB On-The-Go mode. In my bog article http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/kate-alholas-forum-nokia-blog/maemo/2008/01/21/usb-on-the-go i tell how to set up  USB-OTG. For USB OTG host mode. To use ethernet, you need also the dummy IAP and same modifications decripted above modifications to /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/dnsmasq.conf to get it working.  When you plug in adapter, you don't need install driver, just type to super user command prompt

ifup eth0

The new Nokia N810 internet tablet supports a feature called USB-On-The-Go, or shorter USB-OTG. The OTG means that N810 can act in both USB roles, slave and master. You can find more about USB-OTG from http://www.usb.org/developers/onthego/ .

In Slave role N810 acts as a FAT-format memory card or with g_ether driver as a USB networking card. In Slave mode you can connect your tablet to your PC and it shows up by default as external memory card.

Using USB-OTG host mode you can connect your USB memory stick to your tablet, you can also connect tablet to various other memory devices like digital cameras, memory card readers or even to a external hard disk. The N810 can supply limited amount of power to external USB device and no extra powered hub is needed. In practise, hub does not work with the current software version.

To activate USB-OTG host mode there is a special ID pin in micro- or mini USB connector. If this pin is left open, device acts as usb slave(device) mode, if grounded, it acts as master(host) mode. Only problem is that I have not found anywhere a such cable, at least they are not very common in computer shops. If you have a such cable, you can just plug in a USB memory stick and everything works. If you don't have, you have two choices. You can make cable yourself by practicing little bit micro surgery and connect the ID pin to ground or then activate host mode x-terminal shell command prompt.  It is also possible to make small control panel applet to activate the host mode.

Activating host mode from command line

Start "X terminal" application from utilities menu, issue the "sudo gainroot" command in terminal. You should have r&d mode enabled with the linux-flasher to be able use gainroot (sudo ./flasher --enable-rd-mode).

sudo gainroot
echo host> /sys/devices/platform/musb_hdrc/mode

There are also drivers for few other USB devices in the kernel, for example realtek RTL8150 based ethernet adapter.  How to use Realtek ethernet adapter, I will have more info in my next blog entry about USB networking.

If you have come up with some other device that does not yet have kernel support, you may need a separate driver installed for it. As example pl2303 based USB serial converters require an additional driver to be installed. Note also that all devices will not work with N810 even with the driver. N810 can't supply as much power as a PC laptop and USB device power consumption can easilly drain battery empty quickly. All USB devices tells in their device descriptor, how much power they need. If the value is too much, the N810 just refuses to use it or N810 even can't raise power up enough to be able to read this decsriptor. For example there has been used Dlink DUB-E100 with Nokia 770 with external powered USB hub. They are so power hungry that N810 can't use them. Realtek tells that it needs 120mA, D-link 250mA.

Patching normal USB-cable to USB-OTG cable

If you can't find OTG cable anywhere, you can buy normal micro-USB cable and patch it. Don't patch your Nokia cable because OTG-cable can't be used any more to connect your tablet to PC. To patch the cable, you need a small sharp "surgical" knife and soldering iron, and a shrinking tube.

First step is peel soft rubber covering connector body with surgical knife, then lift the top side of metal shield up with knife. You may need to cut the shield soldering that connects the cable to the protective ground. Be careful in lifting the cover because you need to bend it back when the modification is ready. Then solder the two pins together as shown in the picture.

Hello,

This is my first blog entry on this blog, let me introduce myself first: 

I am a Maemo Chief Engineer at Forum Nokia. I have been working with maemo since Nokia 770. I have long history of open source projects, first ones were bios, debuggers and RTOS drivers for 8 bit 6809 and 16/32 bit 68xxx series and after that I have followed the development closely. I have also made several Linux device drivers and the Katix real time operating system which is used on embedded protocol gateways. At the moment I have in garage.maemo.org internet tablet based katix-efis and enginemonitor projects for small aircraft and X-plane flight simulator. I have also other infinity-project to make tablet and openwrt based home automation system.

Forum Nokia is Nokia developers' organization, offering technical and marketing support, tools and documentation to developers.

I am dedicated Linux-user, gadget-lover (there are so many Nokia 770s, N800s, N810s and other cool gadgets along with computers (most of them running Linux and the rest running MacOSX Leopard), etc. in our household) we have two cats and a dog and I fly small aircraft as a hobby. If it is about some cool new gadget, I most likely know about it, or already have it :).

I will publish in this blog maemo related news, interesting issues and also maemo related hints and small tutorials.

Kate

recently...

• maemo in Akademy 2008
• Some cool pick-ups from LinuxTag
• Maemo future roadmap at LinuxTag
• Come to meet us in OSIM San Francisco
• Controlling embedded devices with maemo internet tablet
• Fosdem
• USB networking
• USB On-The-Go
• Introduction to Kate's maemo blog

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