Hello FreeCalypso community, As I wrote here previously, one of the requirements for manufacturing and marketing newly made Calypso devices that are no worse than Openmoko's (i.e., replacing historical short-supply Openmoko devices with a newly made, unlimited availability product of our own) is that we need to develop our own software for per-unit RF calibration on our device production line. We have not been able to find a surviving copy of TI's original production calibration software that was used by FIC (Openmoko's factory), so we have to develop our own replacement. We can probably make our own calibration software even better than Om's (running under Unix/Linux instead of Windows, and with full source - Om only had binaries sans source from what I've been told), but it is a non-trivial amount of work. So far I have just started laying the foundation for my envisioned automated calibration software suitable for production line use.
My original plan was to make our RF calibration software part of our FC host tools, and the development originally started in the freecalypso-tools repository (rfcal subtree). However, because this calibration sw is so specialized (factory-oriented) and different from user- and developer-oriented tools (my calibration sw absolutely requires a R&S CMU200, a big, heavy and expensive RF test machine), I decided that our production line software would be better off in its own repository, maintained separately from FC host tools. However, an unexpected complication arose, and because of this unexpected complication I have to keep the new FC production tools repository private (unpublished) for the time being. The unexpected complication involves a certain Iranian company. There is a company in Iran who are building their own custom hardware that includes a Calypso modem, and I know about it because they've been seeking extensive hand-holding from me with the simplest of issues. I don't know what the purpose and function of their product is, but in hardware terms it is a bastardized derivative of Openmoko's GTA02. The Iranian board has a Calypso modem and a Samsung AP subsystem similar to the GTA02, but there is no direct connection from the AP to the Calypso modem - instead there is a hook-up for some proprietary HSM inserted in between the two. These Iranians have been seeking extensive hand-holding help from me while telling me as little as possible about their project, thus my ability to help them has been limited because I was never given the complete picture. They made most of their technical design decisions without consulting with me, and when I finally saw the schematics for their already-built board (apparently they built their board a couple of months ahead of our FCDEV3B), I saw that their design is absolutely full of *really* clueless blunders. If they had only asked me before they actually implemented all of those totally misinformed design decisions... Miraculously they got their board working despite their design blunders - as just one example, they populated a flash+RAM chip with only 512 KiB SRAM capacity (instead of Openmoko's 1 MiB) without ever bothering to ask ahead of time if it was OK, but they got lucky in that the XRAM usage of TI's TCS211 fw (the basis for both Openmoko's fw and our own Magnetite version) just happens to fit within 512 KiB - the same lucky happenstance that allowed us to port it to the C139. In any case, these Iranians got some version of FC Citrine or FC Magnetite or both running on the Calypso block on their board, and then they quickly discovered that they don't have RF calibration. In fact, I don't even know if they figured out how to initialize their FFS with fc-fsio - they have shown enough cluelessness that it's possible that they couldn't figure out even that part on their own. All I know is that once they realized that they are going to need RF calibration, they emailed me asking me to hand-hold them through the calibration procedures. I told them that this calibration software is still under development and not ready yet, but because we need it for our own production processes (first the FCDEV3B, then our other planned hw products), it is being actively worked on, and that if they would like to use our production calibration solution for their own device production line, I would be glad to give them our software and hand-hold them through its use if in return they help my family with this: https://www.gofundme.com/freecalypso-sister-fund They replied with some lame excuse about not being able to afford this much and so on, but I don't buy their excuses. They are probably thinking that they will get our calibration software for their device production use for free because I am already developing it for our own use and because my personal religion generally requires me to publish all of my intellectual creations free to the world, but I am not happy at all about that possibility, hence I decided to take a preemptive measure in the form of not publishing this calibration software until the Iranian situation is resolved one way or another, or until my family member's breast reconstruction surgery has been paid for by someone else, whichever happens first. Because I do not believe in copyrights or licenses, once a piece of code has been publicly posted, it is free to world for anyone to use as they please, absolutely no conditions or restrictions, hence the only way I can prevent the Iranians from using our production line calibration work without paying for it is to not publish it at all. One thing I need to make very clear is that the calibration software in question is useful *only* to those who are engaged in *physical production* of Calypso-based hardware products. If you are not making your own Calypso hardware, i.e., if you are using Calypso phones and modems made by someone other than you, then those Calypso devices have already been calibrated by whichever factory made them, and that includes our own FreeCalypso hardware products: I am not going to start selling FCDEV3B boards commercially or producing them in volume until I reach the point of being able to ship them fully calibrated from the factory. Calibration with the use of my software also requires having a R&S CMU200, as it is the only RF test station for which I am developing software support, thus if you get my calibration software but don't have your own CMU200, you won't be able to do anything with the sw besides adoring the beautiful source. As things stand presently, the Iranian company is the only entity in the world aside from us that is engaged in building new Calypso-based hardware, and they are the only ones who may be able to make practical use of the calibration software I am developing. And as I see it, these Iranians have been mooching off the community without giving anything back. The entire time I've been working with them they only cared about their special application in their mystery product: most of the problems and issues they have faced are issues of potential interest to the entire community, potentially applicable to other hw platforms and applications, but they never expressed any interest in generic, upstreamable solutions, instead they only cared about their product and application as if no one else in the world uses the Calypso or anything else from Openmoko. And it is not only our FreeCalypso community they've been mooching off of, but Openmoko as well. If they went to Samsung and asked them "hey, can you please give us the hardware design files for your Galaxy XYZ, we need to make a specially modified version of your smartphone for the Iranian government", they would have been laughed at. But Sean Moss-Pultz of Openmoko freely released the PCB design files for the GTA02 motherboard (it was at my asking in early 2015, but still), and these Iranians were able to take that GTA02 PCB design, translate it into Altium with bazillion mistranslation errors because they idiotically refuse to use PADS (can't be because of license issues, as I pointed them to a readily downloadable and perfectly working pirate copy back in 2015), and make their own bastardized version of the GTA02 MB. Then in order to actually produce their bastardized derivative of Om's GTA02, they must have done the arduous work of tracking down and procuring all of the obscure parts used on the GTA02 MB, the same parts which the gta02-core people back in the day said were no longer available. So they solved the part sourcing problem which no one in the Openmoko community was apparently able to solve, yet they are only interested in producing their own bastardized derivative of the GTA02 (their product is so mutilated relative to the real FreeRunner that the Iranian hw would be useless to the community even if we could get a hold of it), and are not interested at all in helping the community build new verbatim, non-bastardized clones of the real FR. I laid all of the above out in the open in the hope that the FreeCalypso community will understand why I feel it would be morally wrong for these Iranians to continue mooching off of us when it comes to the calibration software, and forgive me for keeping that sw unpublished for the time being. In any case, this FreeCalypso production calibration software *will* be published free to the world in the not too distant future, one way or another: I absolutely abhor the notion of proprietary sw of any kind, for any reason, and I can grudgingly allow myself to pursue this unpublished sw route only on a very temporary basis. Considering the most pessimistic scenario, if the Iranians don't pay up, no one else makes a generous donation to restore my dear family member to full womanhood and I have to pay for her breast reconstruction all on my own after saving up the needed 10 kUSD over the next year or two, then the RF calibration software will be released free to the world once we get that breast surgery paid for all on our own, be it 1 y or 2 y from now - I don't see how it could be longer than 2 y even in the most pessimistic scenario. And if someone would like to see it happen sooner, or simply wishes to help out the human family behind FreeCalypso, here is the crowdfunding page once again: https://www.gofundme.com/freecalypso-sister-fund Hasta la Victoria, Siempre, Mychaela aka The Mother _______________________________________________ Community mailing list Community@freecalypso.org https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community