Hi DS! > This is excellent news! Congratulations of the successful production of > this new board :-) Do you think you could perhaps post a couple pictures > of the board in action (such as with the LCD and keypad connected)?
My photography skills are pretty much non-existent (I am a programmer and a gadget-maker, not a photographer), and because I refuse to use sheeple phones, the only kind of camera I can use is the standalone kind, the non-phone kind. I do have a non-phone camera which I use to take various pictures which I post, but my skills with it are abysmal (again, programmer/gadget-maker, not a photographer), so a lot of the time my pictures come out very poorly. Here is one such poor picture I just took: https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/Caramel2/luna-setup-20201206.jpeg The utter mess you see in this photo is how this Caramel2+Luna setup is currently laid out on my bench. The keypad board is on the edge of the photo frame on the left, the DUART28 adapter board is on the edge on the right, Caramel2 and Luna LCD boards are in the middle. The board was on when I took this photo, running FC Tourmaline firmware in bigcolor-vo config, and the LCD was displaying the normal idle screen of the phone UI - but it is almost invisible in the photo, one can just barely make out the big TI logo that appears as the idle screen wallpaper by default. Unfortunately I am not able to get better photos: for moral reasons I cannot allow anyone with a sheeple phone into my sanctuary, and I don't have anyone around here whose skills with a non-phone camera would be significantly better than mine. However, if you (Das Signal) would like to educate our community a little better as to what our Luna development platform looks like and what TI's prototype UI looks like running on this platform, perhaps you could make some pictures or videos using your Luna1 setup. Yes, I realize that you don't have a Caramel2 board yet, you only have your original Caramel1 aka iWOW DSK board, but there is really little difference. A little clarification may be needed for other community members trying to follow: Das Signal and I have been playing with our Luna LCD setup since around May of this horrible year, using iWOW DSK boards (the original dev board nicknamed Caramel) of which there are only two in the world. I wish I could say that I created my Caramel2 invention (a semi-clone of iWOW DSK) in order to make our Luna platform available to more people than just me and DS, but the unfortunate reality is that there does not seem to be anyone else on the whole planet besides our dear DS who would have enough interest in following my work to actually get a handset UI development board. The sad reality is that there is just one person on the entire Earth who does any actual work on FreeCalypso (that's me), there is just one person who finds my work interesting enough to closely follow it hands-on (that's our dear DS), and there is absolutely no one else whose interest extends beyond passively watching from the sidelines. If I see no realistic chance of anyone other me and DS desiring to acquire a development board that can run our work-in-progress handset UI, why did I expend the time, money and energy to design and produce these Caramel2 boards? The answer is mostly political. Since the very beginning of FreeCalypso I have always felt it was important to offer a moral alternative to ubiquitous SIM900/SIM800/etc type of modem modules. Everyone and their dog are now building "half-free" smartphones in which the AP part is free, but the cellular modem module is a 100% closed proprietary black box - everyone other than me, people who don't have the kind of strong moral convictions that I have, have now established a "canon" which no one ever dares to question: the idea that if you need cellular network connectivity in your gadget design, you just take an off-the-shelf 100% closed and proprietary black box module, and stick it into your design. I always wanted to offer a moral alternative in the form of a packaged modem module that is just as much of an off-the-shelf product as the proprietary ones, a module which you can incorporate into your own design just as if it were SIM900/SIM800/etc, but which has the moral distinction of published circuit schematics, chip datasheets and firmware source code. I've been wanting for years to produce and make available such a morally-proper SIM900etc-replacing modem module, but no one ever funded that quest. And then lo and behold, almost exactly one year ago in December of 2019 I accidentally discover the existence of the extremely obscure iWOW TR-800 module - it is basically the exact same thing for which I had been unsuccessfully seeking funding for years, except that it has even more Calypso signals brought out than what is needed for an AT-command-controlled slave modem. There was just one problem: these modules were made by iWOW Connections Pte Ltd and not by Falconia Partners LLC. Keeping their existence/identity secret for much of this year was an emergency short-term action which DS and I took while working out a longer-term strategy, but trying to keep the secret forever was not a viable approach: the #1 enemy of FreeCalypso (the Virginian IP thief-in-chief) already discovered their existence apparently even before DS and I did. So I decided to grab the bull by the horns and adopt the pre-existing iWOW TR-800 module into our FreeCalypso family by rebranding it, turning iWOW TR-800 into FreeCalypso Tango by way of a sticker that is applied to the outside of the module at the same time when it is reflashed to FreeCalypso fw on my "factory" programming station. But if we are going to market these Tango modules as a bona fide FreeCalypso product, then we need to provide the same level of support for them as if we had designed and produced that module from scratch ourselves, or viewed another way, provide at least the same level of support (or better) as iWOW provided before they discontinued and disavowed their product. This level of support primarily means providing a development board that brings out or exercises every module signal in some way, just like iWOW's DSK board - thus the most natural approach was to produce a semi-clone of iWOW's DSK. Caramel was our nickname for iWOW's DSK board, hence our semi-clone thereof got the name Caramel2. So now you know why these Caramel2 boards have been produced - it was a move to save face in the presence of the discovery of the existence of iWOW-made TR-800 modules, along with the tandem move to rebrand these surplus modules into FreeCalypso Tango. But while the primary driver behind the creation of Caramel2 was political, there are a couple of practical (non-political) side benefits from the existence of this new FreeCalypso dev board: 1) While being similar in functionality with only a few losses (no JTAG, smaller flash and RAM), Caramel2 is much cheaper than FCDEV3B, allowing a more affordable FC dev board option. 2) In the unlikely event that someone other than me and DS does wish to play with our handset UI functionality, this Caramel2+Luna option is now available. One downside which you should be able to see from the poor photo linked above is that the complete Luna setup is currently very messy. The ribbon cables that connect our LCD and keypad add-ons to the expansion interface on the Caramel2 motherboard are very bulky and very messy, and the whole arrangement of these separate boards on the lab bench is also a mess, there is no clear natural order in which they should be arranged. These ribbon cables with custom crimp terminations are also insanely labor-intensive to produce. But please remember that both the LCD add-on and the keypad add-on were originally made to connect to iWOW's DSK board through those exact same ribbon cables, well before Caramel2 was conceived. If we had a line-up of people wishing to acquire FreeCalypso handset UI development boards, it would make a lot of sense to produce a more integrated dev board that incorporates the Tango module seat and other Caramel2 peripherals, the LCD module and the keypad button matrix all on the same board, eliminating the more general expansion interface and the ribbon cables for this special-purpose application. But if there is no one in the world besides me and DS who would ever be interested in playing with such a toy even if one landed on their lap at no cost to them, why does it even matter... Hasta la Victoria, Siempre, Mychaela aka The Mother _______________________________________________ Community mailing list Community@freecalypso.org https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community