Surj

Hi All,

Wanted to apologise for the lack of postings. I have been riding through a storm of personal and work related issues that have been usurping my time completely in the past few months.

Deva is making progress with the design but encountered some difficulties in soldering the connector for the Sony LCD display - we have begged/ borrowed got some new kit in to help do that, but he has decided that the first nut to crack will be the Gumstix to GM862 link and the softare to make the two dance with a lesser LCD. I'll leave it to him to post an update on the progress there. The LCD is important to the final design and will be present. As soon as that module is working we will post details of that.

Have hope though - as I said i was thrilled to hear that Casey Halverson in Seattle has made a more basic version work (see previous posting for links)- basically a GM862 with a PIC microcontroller - so the system level of our design is validated .We just have to make one and it appears that the hardest part for us has been the fiddly fabrication. Casey, Deva and Nathan Seidle of Sparkfun will be running a workshop on their efforts to date and basically imparting knowledge on the DIY phone front at the O'Reilly ETel - Emerging Telephony conference. There is a 25% discount as well for readers of this blog - do it by the end of next week and it will be in addition to any other discounts floating around.

"Register here: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/44/register.html
using this discount code: etel06cmfnf
to get 25% off the registration price."

Deva has also told me that he is planning to make a PCB Layout for the parts so that the fiddly fabrication can be reduced - Again I'll let him speak about that - he has buried himself in soldering.