Hello FreeCalypso community, I am trudging along on our FC Tourmaline handset firmware:
https://www.freecalypso.org/hg/fc-tourmaline/ This firmware runs in its full glory (176x220 pixel color UI) only on our Luna development platform, which consists of an LCD of the needed large size connected either to a historical iWOW DSK board or to our own Caramel2. Right now Das Signal and I are the only two people in the world who have the necessary hardware to run this fw (DS has an iWOW DSK board plus my Luna LCD add-on, I have run both iWOW-DSK and Caramel2 versions), so it is rather unfortunate that no one else can see this firmware in action... This handset UI firmware work I am doing in the Tourmaline source tree, it is intended to be the fw component of my still-dearly-desired FreeCalypso Libre Dumbphone handset. Of course I will still need to build the physical handset hw, but I am focusing on the firmware first because hw without fw is nothing but a very expensive paperweight, whereas most of the needed fw can be developed on my current Luna platform. One of the areas I am working on right now is looking for ways to speed up the drawing of the idle screen, one component of which is the background wallpaper. As I was studying this code in need of speeding up (it currently runs too slow, does too many inefficient computation operations), I took a closer look at the wallpaper images included in TI's demo/prototype/PoC handset UI going back to early 2000s. A selection of 5 possible idle screen wallpapers is included: the default is a big TI logo, and the other 4 are pictures of various locations in Edinburgh. Why Edinburgh? The handset UI layer of TI's firmware suite was developed by the group that started out as Condat UK and then became TI-UK when TI bought out Condat, and that UK office was in Edinburgh. Here are the wallpaper images extracted out of TI's demo/prototype/PoC UI code, converted by me to classic Netppm format for viewing with standard tools like xv: https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/TI-wallpapers/ Each of the 4 Edinburgh wallpapers is actually embedded into TI's code as a 175x220 pixel image, one pixel short of the 176x220 pix display size, so whenever one of these wallpapers is selected for display, the rightmost pixel on the LCD remains white in the entire column. The PPM images with 'w' suffix in the filenames have had a white pixel added on the right to bring their size up to 176x220. I would like some help from the community with identifying these Edinburgh images. What are the locations depicted in them? What is the significance of these 4 particular locations in that city? And the monument depicted in the Edinburgh4 image, whose statue is it? squares.ppm is an abstract art image which appears in TI's source (IcnBgdSquares.c, same source file as the Edinburgh images), but it isn't included in the firmware build - it is excluded from compilation by preprocessor conditionals. For our own FreeCalypso handset firmware, I am thinking about removing the entire system of compiled-in wallpaper images and replacing it with a mechanism where the firmware would read the wallpaper image from FFS, with the expectation that the user will use fc-fsio to upload whatever wallpaper image she likes. In the case of traditional locked-down phones where both the firmware source and the development tools are withheld, the traditional handset manufacturers' approach has been to include some manufacturer-defined fixed selection of wallpaper images in the firmware, and let the user choose among this fixed limited set via the menu. Letting the user upload her own images via a Unix/Linux command line tool like our fc-fsio was of course an utterly blasphemous idea to those traditional locked-down phone manufs. But we are different, we are FreeCalypso, and I have no interest in marketing my phones to command-line-phobic sheeple - instead my desired FC Libre Dumbphone will be made specifically for Unix/Linux command line lovers. So why bloat the firmware (and thus slow down compilation and flashing operations) with a bunch of fixed-choice wallpaper images - instead let the flash contains just one wallpaper image, the one installed by the user, and let this one active wallpaper image reside in the FFS portion of the flash, rather than the firmware code. The selection of possible wallpaper images for the end user to choose from then becomes the entire repetoire of images to be found on the Internet, not just some arbitrary set chosen by the manufacturer for inclusion into fw. Hasta la Victoria, Siempre, Mychaela aka The Mother _______________________________________________ Community mailing list Community@freecalypso.org https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community