Hi,
  I was looking at arowboat.org - which is a project at getting Android
working on all TI OMAP series boards and I saw a link to opensourcemid.org.
Apparently, Embest (who also make the DevKit 8000 - a beagle board like
board) have made a 7" MID with GPS, camera, mini PCIe (they have a WCDMA
module), WiFi and bluetooth running on OMAP 3530.
  I ordered a device and I find that :-

1.  It's built quite well
2.  It's responsive and fast (running android 2.1 as of now)
3.  The hardware schematics are available online
4.  The source code for kernel 2.6.29, x-loader and u-boot are also
available online
5.  It has a lot of space between the board and the casing - I'm thinking
mods like the Freerunner Navigation board
6.  The company seems responsive enough

  I'm now looking at getting a custom kernel (something newer) running on
it. Also, I was aondering how do I get SHR ported onto such a device? I have
the entire openembedded based SHR build system (something I've been using to
build stuff for the FreeRunner) with me - but I'm not sure how to go about
changing the target system.

  So here are my questions :-
1.  How do I port SHR to this device (or any other for that matter)
2.  Would any other distribution in the community be interested?
3.  How do I get freesmartphone.org guys etc interested?
4.  Is this sort of interest taboo here ;-)

  I've read enough threads about the next device - but I haven't seen
anything remotely open and available at a decent price till now. Maybe I
need enlightening - but this device seems interesting enough. And it does
give me a new system to build on.
 
  I would love to see an SHR  / Qt based system for something like this.
Andriod is getting better, but frankly, I'd prefer linux based distro any
day over it.


  So, what do you think?

Chaitanya
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Oh! I forgot, it also has 1 mini usb, 2 normal USB ports (keyboard
anyone!), a mic, front-facing camera with the connections for a rear facing
one on the board, a UART output, SIM slot, TF card slot, audio out and video
out.
   Seems to have pretty much covered everything out there.

  Disclaimer : I have nothing to do with embest. Just thought I'd let the
community now. They claim to be 'open' - maybe the community can see if they
truly are.
  
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I am not an expert in this matter, but it looks like they provide only
electronic schematics. What would be more useful are PCB layouts and
some CAD casing drawings. 
You could compare this to such a situation:
	I wrote an application and I claim it is open source because I gave you
block diagram of how it works. And what about the source code? ;)
	I know this somehow irrelevant but couldn't find better example. If you
want to know more and better ask on gta02-core@lists.openmoko.org . It
is low traffic now, but I believe those brains working on the project
are still reading this list.

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Mostly equals to adding support for that device in OpenEmbedded
(conf/machine/*.conf)

BUG-2.0 (bug20.conf) is using same OMAP, so it shouldn't be that hard.

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Hi Martin,
  Can you elaborate? Say I add another conf file to conf/machine/ called
K7.conf. How do I now make a root image for this arch? Of course, I intend
keeping my build system intact for the FR too. So how do I get bitbake to
build images for both in different places on my file system.
  As you can see, I'm quite a noobie when it comes to using bitbake for
building images and that sort of thing.

Thanks
 
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You can start here:
http://wiki.openembedded.org/index.php/Adding_a_new_Machine

For SHR builds:
If you update MACHINE=K7 in local.conf or auto.conf (if using SHR Makefile) 
and launch image build it will build new image in deploy/images/K7 with
right arch etc.

multimachine builds with same tmpdir are working fine so no need to
setup another environment (at least all -native builds are shared for
multimachine builds)

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Hi, c_c!

Thank you for link.

Specifications ( http://www.armkits.com/product/k7.asp ) are not really
promising fast speeds: it is only 600Mhz cpu, and 'up to' 256 Mb sdram
volume is not really good for long term usage. Nothing told about
graphic card, so i guess CPU managing LCD, that should eat cpu resources
too. So, only caches size, memory type (unspecified) are different from
FR.

According to same page critical parts are missing from android like
power management, bluetooth, usb device support, and mic(!) and device
is mostly oriented to WinCE (notice also .asp in web address), this
sounds too bad for anyone who want open device, or hackable device with
linux on board at all.

Regards, Gennady.


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You'll find a more complete spec at opensourcemid.org. Spec is very similar to 
the beagleboard and n900 - same CPU, same RAM. The CPU has PowerVR SGX530 
onboard so I'd be very surprised if it wasn't available for use as it is on 

It may not all be working out of the box, but having the schematics is better 


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