Re: Adding addtitional Sensors to Openmoko

[Rob Williams]

Andy Green wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Michael Tansella wrote: Hi, we want to create an additional Board which includes some sensors bundled with a Microcontroller. What do you think is the easiest way to connect it with the Openmoko. Can we use an UART Port, if yes, what's the best way to get access to it? AFAIK we have 3 UART Ports available. One is used for GSM Modem one for GPS and one for Console. I don't understand what's the third one (Console) for. Can we use it for our project? Do you recommend another possibility? SPI?Are there any free ports which are supposed to be used for hardware extensions? Debug console sets information from bootloader and linux dumped down it on boot, and you can log in there as well. If you stop the tty process spawning in inittab, after boot you'd be able to use it. There is an SPI interface on the testpoints near the debug connector. We would like to avoid using USB because of its complexity. USB is definitely the best solution if you can get over the hump of getting started with a programmable device for it. Everything else means the phone is tethered permanently to your other board. USB is actually a lot easier than you can be led to believe, as there are a number of existing demo/breakout USB boards designed just for this type of application. My favourite are the Phidgets, as they offer not only a range of boards with digital/analog input/outputs, but they'll also work with you to do custom designs/projects and offer a wide range of other types of sensors/etc that you can utilize along with them. They also offer the best software support I've seen for this kind of hardware by supplying development tools and libraries for virtually every programming language under the sun. I don't have an OpenMoko device to play with right now but I've cross-compiled their demo apps (along with my own basic C apps based on their libraries) to various ARM platforms, so shouldn't be a problem from that end either. Thanks, -Rob Williams

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