A New Year and a New Beginning

I know many of you must be wondering if we just disappeared after the announcement of Symbian Foundation transitioning into a licensing authority. Yes ,  it did affect us but we are now back after a break , energised and revitalised to push the project forward.

Meanwhile there was a lot happening in the background,  mostly to do with securing our assets and find a new home for the project.

People on the mailing list must already be knowing – The wildducks project has now officially moved to sourceforge and so has the wiki , the mailing list and the code repositories. We now also have our own little space on the World Wide Web and the anchor for the project  – www.wildducks.org

In terms of  other activities ,

• Antrax have been testing the final kit along with the revised LCD touch screens from China and hopefully all the variants would be available for pre orders very soon.

• People who would have kept an eye on the new code repository would have seen a Pandaboard repository mysteriously creeping in ….. Yes , we do intend to support the mighty Pandaboard and thanks to Lukasz Forynski  , we now have some very initial Symbian boot happening on that. I guess this should be interesting for people who want to play with Symbian’s SMP kernel and it would definitely be fun to get the telephony stack working on that .

• And , we now also have a new contribution from Mobica ready to be pushed to the repos. The contribution is a Symbian bridge software to connect the  modem to the beagleboard over USB and hence achieve better data speeds . That would also free up the serial port on the extension which is currently being hogged-up by the modem. More on that in the coming blogs.

As you all must be aware that due to the SF transition, many of the operations and services of the foundation have ceased to exist including access to the developer websites. However, much of the foundation’s data is available to the public via FTP until 31 March 2011. For access to this content, please e-mail contact@symbian.org.

All this together does affect the future growth and sustainability of the project but we can just hope that the Symbian platform will continue to evolve under Nokia with these resources being available again through new channels. Meanwhile this may also be our opportunity to broaden the scope of the project and make it OS agnostic ?

When we started , one of the initial  vision was to make an “open phone” …. a hackers device which could be used by researchers, geeks and students to experiment further. Wouldn’t it be better now if we see to provide such a platform supporting multiple open source variants like Symbian , Android and Meego. That would expand the reach of the project and our existing community. It would also help us get more hands to support developement,  specially for the Linux variants. It’s an open question and it’s important because moving ahead we see this project to be driven by need and passion of open source enthusiats.We look forward  to hear your views and feedback.

We would also like to extend our deepest thanks to everyone who contributed to the project … we should all be proud of our accomplishments

More blogs to come and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @WildDucksTweet.

cheers !!

The Wild ducks Team

Wild Ducks at www.see2010.org

Just back from SEE 2010 in Amsterdam.

This is a quick blog post telling you what happened around Wild Ducks. In the next few days, we will post few more blogs with more details on each part described in this blog.

Wild Ducks had a boot to show the latest Wild Ducks kit.

The Wild Ducks booth at SEE2010

We also had a panel: “Wild Ducks: an open, low cost, hardware reference platform for the Symbian community” on the first day of SEE2010 during which more than 30 persons discussed with the panel composed of Arunabh Ankur, Pierre Cochart and Lukasz Forynski around the ongoing work done for the Wild Ducks project.

Wild Ducks panel at SEE 2010

The Wild Ducks also won the Symbian Open source community award for the most active package or incubation project in the second half of 2010

Here is a video of Arunabh talking about the Wild Ducks kit on the Wild Ducks booth at SEE2010:

We have seen plenty of people on the Wild Duck booth and during our different talks who showed so much interest in what the Wild Ducks community is doing.

We are hoping that many of these people who have shown interest, will join the Wild Ducks community very soon.

Don’t forget to follow us on Tweeter or join us on the mailing list.

ArnaudL

The Wild Ducks t-shirt has arrived

Good news !! we have received the new Wild Ducks t-shirts with our cool logo.

Wild Ducks showing off their new cool Wild Ducks t-shirt

The Wild Ducks team will be there at www.see2010.org (this time in Amsterdam) on the 9th and 10th of November where we will have:

1. A Demonstration of the new kit
2. A Wild-ducks talk in the Platform development track
3. Birds of a Feather sessions.

Check out the SEE2010 schedule for details.

We will have some t-shirts to give away, but for that you need to join the Wild Ducks Community. How to do that? Very easy.

1. Join the Wild Ducks mailing list
2. Send an email on the Wild Ducks mailing to introduce yourself
3. Print that email and bring it to the Wild Ducks stand at SEE2010 and grab your Wild Ducks t-shirt.

For people who are already on the mailing lists and have posted something (queries , advice , introduction) you can straight away come and grab your T-shirt .

We also have our new Badges , some very cool business cards and Flyers introducing the project and the community. For all the Wild Ducks goodies, it’s in the limit of the stock available. It’s on the first come, first served basis.

Thanks to Anna and Annabel for the cool Wild Ducks brand they helped us to develop.

The Wild Ducks community needs you. Join us!

Wild ducks community member wanted!

Arnaud

Wild Ducks

Getting fshell running on the Beagleboard

I went along to the Wild Ducks last Tuesday for the first time, to see if I could get fshell working with the latest SF PDK and the rev C Beagleboard. I’d previously had it working on S^2 with a rev B board so I knew it shouldn’t be that hard, but I don’t have a rev C so being able to drop by the Foundation offices and use their hardware was pretty handy.

After a couple of hours and some pizza (and, I admit, a bit of cursing at the baselines and wikis) I had fshell running on the beagle, with over a serial connection. It would have taken much longer and more swearing if I hadn’t been sitting next to people who could point me in the right direction. There were a couple of things in the beagle code that didn’t play nice with fshell: there was no machine UID set in the HAL, and the serial keyboard driver would get in the way of fshell’s use of the serial port and couldn’t be excluded from the ROM without hacking the IBYs manually.

Since the beagleboard package owner was also attending the Wild Ducks night, I was able to make the changes I needed there and then (1 and 2), commit them and have them approved all in the space of half an hour. The upshot being, the MCL version of fshell can work with the head-revision FCL beagleboard package without having to change anything yourself.  See the fshell quickstart page for more info. I wish I could get stuff done as quickly in my day job…

Next stop, getting it working with a full gui ROM.

Students interested by the Wild Ducks project

Hi All,

For the last 3 weeks we had some students in the second year of Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) in Electronic Engineering from the University of Westminster in London who came to visit us to find out what the Wild Ducks project was about and what they could do with Wild Ducks in relation to their studies and projects they need to do during their BEng course.

Leading the way, Rob Forsyth came 3 weeks ago on Tuesday evening to get some information about what the Wild Ducks was about. The following week he came with four over fellow students and last Tuesday with two more of his fellow students.

 

Three students from the University of Westminster visiting Wild Ducks at Symbian HQ in London

 

We start by presenting what is Symbian as a company and operating system, then the reasons behind the Wild Ducks project, which is to create your own phone using the Symbian open source code and off-the-shelf components.

From there we are engaging the conversation on what they are looking for, what are their ideas, how we can help them. By doing this, we are trying to help them to get all the information they need to take the right decision to ensure them success in their studies and get their diploma.

 

Domino Pizzas helping to get the discusion going

 

It’s still early days, but we are hoping that some or all of them will join the Wild Ducks community to realise their projects, to acquire some experiences & knowledge in the development of real projects working with Wild Ducks community members from all around the world who could become their future professional network.

You never know what a project like Wild Ducks could bring to you in the future by opening some doors for your future job, who knows?

Hopefully, this will the beginning of a cooperation between the University of Westminster and its students, Symbian and the Wild Ducks community.

To Be Continued.

The Wild Ducks

First Bluetooth SHAI adaptation from Broadcom to work on Wild Ducks hardware

Hi All,

I’m Arnaud Lenoir from Symbian Foundation and one of the Wild Ducks members.

One of my job as a Wild Ducks member is to welcome people on Tuesday evenings, answer their questions, help them find what they need to do and sometimes do some video interviews to promote the Wild Ducks community and our members.

So when Christophe Porcel from Broadcom came to London for week to integrate and test Broadcom’s Bluetooth SHAI on the Beagleboard, I jumped on the occasion to record a little interview with Christophe. For those of you who have never heard SHAI before – SHAI is the Symbian Hardware Abstraction Interface. It defines a new, consistent hardware interface at the bottom of the Symbian platform software stack that is in many areas closer to the hardware, leading to a thinner (and easier to create/maintain) adaptation layer.

As usual, the video was done without any specific staging as we like to be spontaneous and as real “Wild Ducks”.

Here is the video:

It is good to see Wild Ducks getting more and more support from the wider community and everybody getting something useful out of it : like in this case we helped Broadcom deliver their first Bluetooth SHAI implementation , integrating and testing it on the Wild Ducks hardware.

For a company to send one of their top engineers for a week to work with us, shows the level of commitment towards Symbian and Wild Ducks.

We still have some glitches left with the integration, but we will keep you updated with the progress.

We are hoping to see more companies getting involved with Wild Ducks in the coming months but also individuals contributors.

The Wild Ducks

One Step Closer to a Working Touch Screen …

If you were closely watching the beagleboard repository , you would have seen two recent contributions – The first is an IIC SPI driver implementation (along with test code). The Serial Peripheral Interface Bus or SPI is a synchronous serial data link used to talk to a variety of peripherals like the LCD display , touch devices , Ethernet, USB, MMC /SD card. The contribution comes from Lukasz Forsynki , a Senior Software Engineer at Nokia and an individual contributor to the project. It’s his sheer passion which inspired him do the SPI driver as it was a prerequisite for the touch screen integration.  Thank you Lukasz , you are a rock star…..

BYD LCD in action

The second contribution is a Display PDD for the BYD LCD display. This now enables full graphical UI rendering on the BYD LCD ; all thanks to the hard work put in by Will Long and Steven Yu from BYD. Further technical details about the LCD display could be found at the project wiki.

Together , this takes us one step closer to have a working touchscreen on the Beagleboard. At the same time the SPI driver also opens up possibilities to add more peripheral support like the Ethernet.

Lukasz and Will  Long have now started working on the touch integration and we may very soon see some progress. Will be happy to share a video here when things start working.

Also , as most of you must be knowing  , we look fwd to have the touch screen commercially available as a part of the ‘Wild Ducks kit’. Details for that are coming up soon , so keep tuned …

Arunabh

The Wild Ducks Project at OpenTech 2010

Last Saturday I attended the OpenTech 2010 conference at University of London, giving a 15 minute presentation on the Wild Ducks project. OpenTech is “an informal, low cost, one-day conference on slightly different approaches to technology, politics and justice.” I thought the Wild Ducks project fit this description pretty well. OpenTech has published my slides, as well as the audio recording.

About 50 people attended the presentation, which was more than I had expected, and people were very interested in our take on a DIY smartphone. Among the questions asked by the audience was one about battery packs for the device, which we haven’t really considered, and the openness of GSM and UMTS stack and licensing requirements for prototype hardware (which we get around by using a licensed chipset).

Since people like hardware they can touch and feel, I brought the Wild Ducks stack, consisting of a BeagleBoard, our own BeagleUMTS extension and the BYD LCD display. I handed around the stack, which was gone with the audience for a long time before I finally got it back (phew!).

About ten people came up to me after the presentation and wanted to know more, so I gave them our contact details. We hope to have them over for pizza next Tuesday!

The Duck Starts Talking

Hi there! As you can see,  we have a blog now .

We thought it would be nice to have our own corner to share the exciting tid bits from the project and  bring you news about everything we have been doing.

Who are we? For those of you who haven’t heard about the Wild ducks, check out some of our previous blog posts on the Symbian Blog or the project wiki itself.

A typical Wildducks night

There is a lot happening and we look forward to sharing all that interesting stuff with you.

So keep the support coming and stay tuned ….

Cheers !!
Arunabh

Project Lead , Wildducks