a Quick Glance, SmartQ V7 Orbiter.

[tschak909]

I have done a quick port of the Orbiter to the SmartQ V7 tablet. I had originally bought this device to do next generation orbiter research, but until the Mali200 chip is supported, I will not be able to, so I decided to make it useful in the mean time...

It is an ARM based tablet running on the TeleChips TCC8902 System-on-a-Chip, giving roughly an ARMv7 core.

It has 256 Megabytes of RAM, and comes with a triple booting firmware for Linux, Windows CE 6, and Android 1.5.

The device itself is very rough, but very open. Not of the potential of the hardware is harnessed at the moment, for example the Mali200 3D accellerator present in the device is not supported. However the supplied VideoLAN player does have video codec accelleration for the on-board codec accelerator and HDMI output, hence the moniker of an HD MID.

This is an incomplete port, as it uses the NOKIA770 macros, and thus is missing the various screens for self setup on the Orbiter itself. I will not complete this port unless there is sufficient interest in me to pay for the 20 hours remaining to do the port.

With the port finished, it would allow:

* setup entirely on the device
* installation from the web admin, via a package
* nice icon for launching
* support for the hardware keys for pagination and playlist jumping.

A video is here: http://qik.com/video/5895272

Now, I am back to squashing that last asterisk bug.

-Thom

[buckle]

Seeing the video live was pretty neat, I must admit.  Need to do more of that, for sure.

Of course I'm interested in seeing a nice, shiny orbiter port for my V7.  Not sure how many others have one around here, though.  Maybe this will generate some more interest in the device.

Nice work.

[Kezza]

Great work. I'm in the process if investigating these sorts of devices for surfing the web, orbiter etc.

This one is now towards top of list since can get orbiter on it but wish it had GPS like the zenpad.

[rperre]

I like that as an orbiter, nice and sleek, great job, i wish i could do about 1% of what you do.

Richard

[tschak909]

Thank you so much for the sentiment. The SmartQ V7 is a nice device, even though there are not drivers for all the chips on it yet. I hope this will change, as I originally bought the device for orbiter research.

However, it still needs work before it can be released, and it conflicts directly with my work with trying to squash the one remaining bug in the telecom subsystem before we can release 0810... sooo.. I need to work on that...

however, if...

There are enough donations for roughly 10 to 20 hours worth of work to make the needed patches to Orbiter as well as the packaging to make the final polished version...

I could do the finishing work.

that is of course, unless somebody steps in and volunteers to do the remaining work, particularly:

* support for the hardware keys to act as pagination and playlist skip
* support for the menu key to switch to desktop
* proper subclassing of OrbiterLinux using GTK+ to provide UI for Progress window, and prompt windows so that new orbiters can be created, and so that orbiter regeneration can be properly monitored.
* proper deb packaging, with needed dependencies so that it can be installed from the web admin.

So, either somebody needs to do those, or donations need to be made so that I can finish the work (I am without a contract at present, so I can do the work)

-Thom

[pcbastard]

Thom,

Count me in.  $100.

Leo

[grind]

Unbelieveable... Tschak your simply genius!

How much time do you spend in LinuxMCE per day?

[rperre]

Tschak would this be easy to also run it on different ARM9 platforms, like the mini2440?

Richard

[tschak909]

The mini2440 is not an arm9. It barely runs ARMv4, and hari ran into severe alignment issues when trying to run it on the device. I will try again, but this device has been a severe pain in the ass from the get-go for Orbiter.

-Thom

[rperre]

I guess i'm confused about what and ARM9 is, the website http://www.friendlyarm.net/products/mini2440 says its an ARM920T 400Mhz ARM9 processor and it supports linux 2.6.

Not trying to create an argument, just trying to figure out what it means.

Richard

[tschak909]

It does say it's an arm9, I am just remembering from the hell we had to deal with on building orbiter to run correctly...

-Thom