This time around Santosh Vattam and myself are taking leads in having a RTEMS Workout. We have put up the pre-requisites, purpose and general outline on the wiki page here. Currently we are stream lining the objectives into being more specific. If everything goes well, we will be kick starting the workout with a basic introduction to RTEMS, a quick overview of the architecture, a walk through of source code structure and some basic knowledge sharing wrt what might be required during the next 4 days. So Day 1 would mostly be setting up and getting up to base. Day 2, 3 and 4 would be hard days filled with coding, debugging and lots of fun! Day 5 would be more of a wrap up – collecting patches, cleaning up things, sanity checks and reporting!

So, if you want to see your contributions go into NASA and ESA space shuttles then RTEMS workout is the place you need to head to. RTEMS community is a bunch of extremely nice people full of patience and am sure you will have fun hacking with us.

On a sidenote, I am currently at Zurich Airport calculating the probability of missing my connecting flight given that my first flight is delayed, life is full of mathematics. Number never fail to impress me. See you at FOSS.IN 2009!

Most often when we start a project, we get a very generic picture , read around the project’s required literature background and immediately get into the “details” of the system a bit too fast without “completely” getting a grip on the Functional Overview of the system. Many people do the documentation (including explaining the design structure, functional flow) after coding a basic prototype and this itself in my opinion is a flaw. I found it much better to do the reverse and found most successful “engineers” do that way. There have also been scenarios where people have asked me “You draw a structural representation of your system before implementing??” which I find very amusing. How can one get something done without having a picture on paper first?

So the first thing I do now when starting off on a new project is to get a very high abstract picture of the requirements of the project. Then a bit more digging into the “functionality”. It more or less can be compared to a behavioural modeling of the project. Something like this  . Note that the picture does not have any details of implementation (like which function to call, in what module will the implementation go into, what parameters to pass, which module is reusable etc etc). Its just plain functional diagram. This in my opinion helps one to cover most use cases, error scenarios. Its much easier to handle or think about these scenarios at a high level. Believe me, its just too easy to get into the nitty gritty and start putting down the details. Slap yourself and come out of that once you find yourself doing it. The paradigm is that once you are into the details you lose track of the big picture and hence the wider scope and overlook several scenarios. Yes, of-course there will still be some scenarios overlooked but it would be less in number and much easier to handle.

Once most cases are covered one can now, start digging into the diagram and find out re-usable portions of a module easily by repeating flow diagrams, eliminate conditions etc. And then get into the low level design and coding aspect. Also having such a high level functional diagram in place gives rise to many test cases and ensures you test most common conditions before hand. I use Freemind for these diagrams. A great tool not only for mind mapping but also for such things.

It might sound very trivial, but how many of us have got stuck in the utter complexity of the system and miserably struggled to get ourselves out of the situation? If you have any other suggestions do feel free to leave a comment.

- PIKLab, the  IDE for application development for PIC Micro controllers was failing to build from source on Fedora 9. Fixed it and uploaded into the Fedora repos. Thanks to Chitlesh for sponsoring the upload. Here is the commit message.

- Working on getting Ecos packaged for Fedora. Fedora Electronic Laboratory 10 “DVD” is on its way..
- Still no updates from the Regents of the University of California regarding the license of Magic. Still to get into Debian/Ubuntu. Same story holds good for IRSIM. But, IRSIM has an explicit COPYRIGHT file which clear mentions that it is licensed under GPL, the debian mentors team would want it to be included on all source file headers. May be I misunderstood this thread. If anyone can provide more clarity on this, I would be more than happy because its struggling to get into the repos.

- Committed a patch provided by Marcelo Souza to fix SF Bug #1966993 in gnusim8085. Still loads more to go.

- It is very clear now that Debian/Ubuntu are lagging behind in the tools available for Electronic design, embedded development. May be I can change that. Seems like the target I set for the year regarding the same is on track, just with some of the above mentioned license issues stopping it from going to completion But its Never say Die. Certain things are never in your hands.

Personal updates

- Been living like a nomad for the past few days out of my car. Sleeping at all friend’s places, using my employer’s restrooms to great extent.

- My three year long stay in Bangalore coming to an end. More updates on that soonish.

1. Harald Welte – OpenMoko: What, why and how
2. Holger Hans Peter Freyther – Using OpenEmbedded to power Open Devices
3. Pramode C.E – FreeBird – A GNU/Linux based mobile robotics platform for introductory Computer Science and Engineering education.
4. Rakesh Peter – Hacking the Air Waves with GNURadio
5. Thomas Gleixner – Turning Linux into a Real-time Kernel
6. Naba Kumar – Introduction to Maemo development
7. Naba Kumar – Anjuta DevStudio; where we are and where we want to be
8. James Morris – How and Why You Should Be a Kernel Hacker
9. Lennart Poettering – The PulseAudio Sound Server

Be there.. It can never get bigger than this. FOSS.IN

Disclaimer:  The above list is solely my interests and does not relate to, in any form any other organisation/individual ‘s point of view.

The room was filled with about 100 people or may be even less by around 1600 hrs and Tejas welcomed the audience and introduced the speakers (did they really need an intro???) Sean started off with how he got this whole idea of developing a Open Phone and the difficulties faced in convincing the FIC Management to go and support this project. Then Harald Welte took over and started speaking about the more interesting aspects of the phone. Yes, the technical details. An interesting piece of software is the “devirginator” which will enable you to completely reflash the entire phone right from the firmware. The Neo1973 phone comprises of two proprietary blocks apart from the completely Free and Open Applications Processor. One is the GSM Module (the application processor can communicate using standard AT commands to this chip) and the other is the AGPS module. Apart from these two every piece of “substance” that goes into the phone is Free and Open. Harald gave a live demo of Dialing and Incoming call and also the UI as such in general. Snacks were served and everything wound up by around 1930 hrs. I met up with empty_mind, kushal, shres, t3 and my long lost friend “Manager” Mahendra I had discussions with Sean regarding setting up Labs in Universities with OpenMoko providing the platform. Some of the Indian Universities should think about this as Sean is already thinking on a win-win cost model for Universities (especially in India). Great Learning opportunity in Hands University guys!! Make use of it.

It was a lot of fun. Photo set here

There are two files in which the HIDD_ENABLED flag has to be set as against my assumption of setting it in only the /etc/default/bluez-utils file.

The other file in which the flag has to be set is /etc/init.d/bluetooth i.e HIDD_ENABLED = 1. Then do a restart of the bluetooth services by

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

and lo and behold bluetooth RC works. In my excitement I tried the .hid configuration files of mplayer from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BluetoothRemoteControl so that I could control mplayer using my mobile phone. Yay!!! I am controlling movie playback lying on my bed. Next step was to try the Totem configuration file from the same page. It worked. So I decided to write my own configuration file and image for Rhythmbox, my most used music player. And here it is, tried and tested with K750i mobile phone.

Download the Rhythmbox configuration file here. I also modified the image in the HID configuration file to depict the mobile keypad keys <-> functionality mapping. It looks something like the one below.

After these changes to the two files I made, even the file system browsing via bluetooth using the object exchange protocol works. Yay!

Photos are here: SSN Embedded Workshop Photos
PS: w00t!! We treated like real BIG guests Special thanks to Srikanth and Jagadeesh and the entire CSE Dept. Thanks to Mr. Maran (Placement Officer), Dr. Chitra (HOD, CSE) and Mr. Prasad for all the support and hospitality they extended.