Vogue-Tec News # 2

The annual review of innovations, interesting and general events around the player from Vogue magazine, and now Playboy.

Content

• Playboy player
• New linux
• VNC!
• Case, SDIO, I2C and everything, everything, everything ...
• FAQ

Playboy player

Once again, I welcome you to the review of events around AmeriChip players, as you probably guessed, we will first consider the new player pasted in Playboy magazine. According to unconfirmed data, the magazine has been released in an edition of 1000 copies, its cost ranges from 90 to 140 rubles, which is not bad, in general. The main differences are a smaller flash drive on the board - 512MB, the second button and another revision of the processor, eliminated from annoying noise in the speakers during operation. Although some such soundtrack operations even liked. The player considered odinokij_kot in more detail in his topic - Playboy with a video ad for Marlboro or the return of the player from Vogue magazine .

New linux

In the meantime, fellow whitequark and his friend Grindars finished Linux to a working state. No, of course that which gave us Ingenic was also to some extent working and even started, but it was far from ideal. And that's why far: a) the old kernel b) there is no support for ubifs c) a bunch of firewood written by curved programmers who conflict with other drivers and are difficult to port to the new kernel. Throwing out sound drivers and IPUs to the nearest window pane — our board files were moved to 2.6.38 and 39. The main build system was the squirrel, which was written by the same whitequark Linux Embedded Collector, available here . squirrel is written in Ruby and can be easily sharpened for any system, which was done. Now we have a full toolchain for the device, working SDL, directfb and fusion. In fact, now you can pick up any software you want on our system. Installation instructions, files and everything you need is here.
')

VNC!

The first graphic application that was assembled for the player was directvnc, which displays to the player through the fusion any VNC connection! This allows, for example, to use the player as a monitor to some X server, or to share the screen on the player. The fact that directvnc doesn’t know how to scale the image at all is distressing, and connecting to a large screen produces results like in the picture in the title of the topic. This can be fixed only in one way, with a help of tightvnc or another vnc server, you can start a session with the required screen geometry - 480x272. It will look like this:


or so:

However, it is worth considering that at the moment VNC is intended mainly for image output, there is no control. However, the fact that directvnc sees ADC buttons suggests that it will work soon.
To launch the client's VNC on the player, execute the following commands, connecting to the player via VNC:
[root@squirrel] ~ # depmod
[root@squirrel] ~ # modprobe fusion
[root@squirrel] ~ # directvnc <IP >:< VNC> -p <VNC>


Soon, I will add the full instruction how to raise the VNC in the FAQ on the site.

Case, SDIO, I2C and everything, everything, everything ...

In the course of poking everything you can into the player, it was discovered that it pretty well fits into the Sony PSP case. If you have a player and the corpse of the PSP - you can try to combine them. Still there is an idea to buy a case with Dealextreme, but then you will need to purchase more buttons, since in the PSP they are located on separate boards, or make these boards yourself. Next in line are the interfaces of our device, one of them was SDIO. And there was a problem. SDIO can not be made full, without disabling the built-in flash memory, so we have a processor. You can run SDIO in single-bit mode, but is it enough for work, for example, sdio-bluetooth, sdio-wifi or something else? As a result of the discussions, it was decided to simply throw out the built-in flash drive and load the percent from the sd card and then you can use all 4 bits of the SDIO and connect any hardware that eats the Linux kernel. Along the way, it was decided to make an interface expander board through I2C interface, the latter needs to be developed from scratch, and if you are interested, welcome to the maillist on Google groups.

FAQ

In connection with the influx of a huge number of users who bought the player and did not know what to do with it, a section of frequently asked questions was created on the Google site. If you have a question or even an answer to a question, you are welcome .

On this, the story with the player, of course, does not end there. I hope AmeriChip will sell its advertising to someone else or change the platform to some more powerful one, but for this, investigate the player, learn how to practice, ask questions in the group, read the FAQ before, and until the next checkpoint!

Links
Vogue-Tec News # 1
Vogue-Tec News # 0
Vogeeky
Google Group