Nokia 770 Orbiter

[totallymaxed]

dude! my access point...is 7....feet.....away.....

and you're telling me it's wifi issues? ....jeebus... if it were in another room, i might buy that.

-Thom

Yep I am... it happens with WinCE Orbiters and to a lesser extent with Symbian as well. Its got very little to do with distance and more to do with the Orbiter's sensitivity to even small increases in latency. Thats why their is a tick box when you create an Orbiter manually in Web Admin for WiFi connected devices. This problem has been there for a long time, back in the early Pluto days.

[tschak909]

yup, i have that checked.

-Thom

[totallymaxed]

yup, i have that checked.

-Thom

...but that check box is not a complete fix. It makes it better (try it with the check box off ;-) )but does not fix the problem.

[nite_man]

The problem with crashing of Orbiter is related with loosing of WiFi connection. I don't understand why it happens. But sometimes I cannot even ping my 770 which is one meter from access point. After one-two minutes it appear in the ping. I didn't face with that problem on N800. So, I suspect that something wrong with WiFi implementation on Nokia770. I have to dig Maemo mail list to solve that.

[totallymaxed]

The problem with crashing of Orbiter is related with loosing of WiFi connection. I don't understand why it happens. But sometimes I cannot even ping my 770 which is one meter from access point. After one-two minutes it appear in the ping. I didn't face with that problem on N800. So, I suspect that something wrong with WiFi implementation on Nokia770. I have to dig Maemo mail list to solve that.

Thats strange. We don't see that problem here as far as I know with our 770. The WiFi seems rock solid as far as we can tell. We don't have an 800 here yet to compare with though.

[nite_man]

Thats strange. We don't see that problem here as far as I know with our 770. The WiFi seems rock solid as far as we can tell. We don't have an 800 here yet to compare with though.

That's true. But I have a lot of cases when connection manager shows hight level of WiFi signal but device cannot be even pinged (no orbiter application run on it at that time). I already reported that problem in the Maemo mail list. One of possibility of that problem can be WLAN Power Save Mode which is used on Nokia770. Some AP cannot work with that mode correctly. Anyway, I'm digging that problem and I hope together with Maemo guru we'll find solution.

[totallymaxed]

Thats strange. We don't see that problem here as far as I know with our 770. The WiFi seems rock solid as far as we can tell. We don't have an 800 here yet to compare with though.

That's true. But I have a lot of cases when connection manager shows hight level of WiFi signal but device cannot be even pinged (no orbiter application run on it at that time). I already reported that problem in the Maemo mail list. One of possibility of that problem can be WLAN Power Save Mode which is used on Nokia770. Some AP cannot work with that mode correctly. Anyway, I'm digging that problem and I hope together with Maemo guru we'll find solution.

OK... sounds good. We'll keep monitoring the 770 as we use it  in demo's / testing and see if we notice any moments where the Orbiter app has any connectivity issues.

One thing we have noticed is that in the Media Floor plan if we have several MD's playing media the MD icon's on the Floorplan do not get coloured correctly. They always stay black instead of the colour of the Media they are playing. The Media list does have the correct colour by the way. Just thought I'd mention this... its a minor thing but it would be good to get a fix foe this.

[tschak909]

I have noticed this, as well, now that you mention it.

-Thom

[chrisbirkinshaw]

Is there any hope of getting follow-me to work with this device? Perhaps a BT connection could be opened and used for proximity detection but the wi-fi used for the orbiter?

This would be very cool....!

[darrenmason]

Ok, finally got one of these things. It scores highly on the gadget scale. My wife wasn't overly impressed that I had added another 'toy' to the collection...but anyway.

Started to install the Orbiter on it last night as per nite_man's website instructions.
Got up to the point where it was missing the libxmu6 and it wasn't in any repositories. At that stage it was late so I went to bed - now that I have read through this thread it looks like it is easily fixed by adding the bora repository, so hopefully should be quite straightforward to get working tonight.

Anyway, the point of my post. I have noticed (as other seem to have) that I get connection dropouts using the browser fairly regularly and it seems to be fine after it reconnects - but this obviously slows things down - and by the sounds of it will wreak havoc with the orbiter.
TotallMaxed doesn't seem to have these problems, and others seem to be less affected by it. Could you guys please reply with details of your wireless access points and any special setup that was done on it.

I have managed to avoid wireless up to this point as my house was relatively easy to wire but I went and bought a Linksys WRT54G esecially for the Nokia 770. I think I have set it up with pretty much the standard settings and it is using WPA2. The nokia finds it OK (although I thought range would be better) but if other have advice for optimising this setup then it would be appreciated.
Wondering about the Power Saving talk people were discussing. Couldn't recall seeing anything in setup regarding this so not sure about the Linksys support for this.
Perhaps installing OpenWRT on the access point might give better results... Anyone???

Looking forward to using as an Orbiter. I am very impressed with the screen on these things and as the price drops they are positioning themselves as the perfect orbiter.

Agree, using Bluetooth for 'FollowMe' similar to Mobile Orbiter would be nice, other things that are springing to mind now are;
* Extend it to a full linucMCE machine with its own launcher (similar to MediaDirector) so that it can run other devices. It would obviously make a good Asterisk extension and it would sometimes be nice to have it play media itself (sort of a mobile Media Director).
The core could have a device that streams media for it and scales on the fly???
* Move the code and binaries into the linuxMCE repositories and setup an Orbiter device template that reacts to Plug'n'Play - this would bring the masses

Anyway , enough ranting

Darren

[nite_man]

Is there any hope of getting follow-me to work with this device? Perhaps a BT connection could be opened and used for proximity detection but the wi-fi used for the orbiter?

This would be very cool....!

If I understand clearly it's too difficult use the function 'Follow Me'  with any Bluetooth devices. Because the range of Bluetooth is too big. How the system will understand which MD you want to use if, for example, three of them can see your Bluetooth device? IMHO more appropriate way is to use manual switching like on FiireChief or using Orbiter  functionality -  press button "F" on the media screen and choose desired room.

[nite_man]

2Darren: I'm thinking about automation of process of Orbiter installation. Probably, I'll create a simple application with will download and install all dependencies. For the end of users it'll be the best solution. Also, I'm going to improve it a bit: add checking of WiFi connection and restart the Orbiter automatically (similar way as it's done for XP Orbiter).

As many people told me in the Maemo mailing list the problem with WiFi connection on the Nokia770 most probably related with WLAN Power Save Mode. I use DLink DI-524 Wireless Router and I didn't find any information about that feature there.

[totallymaxed]

2Darren: I'm thinking about automation of process of Orbiter installation. Probably, I'll create a simple application with will download and install all dependencies. For the end of users it'll be the best solution. Also, I'm going to improve it a bit: add checking of WiFi connection and restart the Orbiter automatically (similar way as it's done for XP Orbiter).

As many people told me in the Maemo mailing list the problem with WiFi connection on the Nokia770 most probably related with WLAN Power Save Mode. I use DLink DI-524 Wireless Router and I didn't find any information about that feature there.

Making the install more accessible to people would be a good idea I agree.

As to WiFi drop-outs etc... we don't seem to have many problems with those here on 770. We are Using NetGear WGR614 WiFi AP's mainly and these seem to work fine for us. We have used the default Wifi setup as far as I know. In Web Admin we do select the 'Uses Wifi networking' check-box when creating the Orbiter for the N770's - but thats about all we do.

[Stingly]

I'm really looking forward to an easy way to get this working! Any idea how long it will take before its ready? I'm far too much of a linux noob to do it all manually, but if we're looking at months of development then I may have to give it a go!

I've bought a 770 purely to use as an orbiter!

[nite_man]

I'm really looking forward to an easy way to get this working! Any idea how long it will take before its ready? I'm far too much of a linux noob to do it all manually, but if we're looking at months of development then I may have to give it a go!

I've bought a 770 purely to use as an orbiter!

All Orbiter dependencies are in the Maemo extra repository. So, you can easily install them using Application Manager. Just download the latest version of the Orbiter package for your OS and install it. That's it. I suspect it should take 30 minutes maximum to setup the Orbiter.