Surj - Sometimes you have to unsubscribe

Radio Charts

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 08:45:14 -0700

RadioSherpa provides cool radio charts.

Tuxcess!

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 08:06:24 -0800

TuxPhone was covered in the wired magazine's Dec. 2006 issue . we are happy that our work was recognized by one of the top geek magazines. however, the article *incorrectly* credits home brew mobile phone club for the development of this phone, although we (Surj, Colin and I) busted our balls to make it happen.

didn't someone say "Success is a bastard. Every one claims to be its father."?
at least Tux is a success - Tuxcess?.

just to be clear: Matt Hamrick, the founder of home brew phone club did give us credit. however, it seems like the author of wired article seems to have missed it. perhaps the wired journalist was unwired during the credits session. (i couldn't resist this pun.)

RadioSherpa

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:07:24 -0700

posted by Deva.

i am involved with RadioSherpa,a cool startup that is developing visual programming guide for digital radios. check them out!

nidifugous tux

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:47:21 -0700

posted by Deva Seetharam

Tuxphone is working and the hardware files are on sourceforge.

what the hell is nidifugous? i learnt from OneLook it means "leaving the nest soon after hatching". (etymology: Latin nidus => nest + fugere => to flee.)

yes, we are glad to let you know that tux(phone) has hatched and moved to OpenCellPhone.Org. see the that site for the latest picture of tuxphone.

we have created a 2-board (one breakout board + gumstix) version of cell phone and this phone was demonstrated at the O'Reilly Foocamp 2006.

quick updates

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 19:38:30 -0800

quick updates:

Colin Cross, an extraordinary hacker, has agreed to help us in laying out the tuxphone board.
Sourceforge has approved our project application. now we can use http://tuxphone.sourceforge.net to create a community project.
we have registered the domain name www.opencellphone.org. soon we will move tuxphone related contents to that site.

NewScientist covers TuxPhone

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:48:09 -0800

Deva Seetharam

Mason Inman contacted me in the first week of february 2006 (just after Etel conference) about writing an article on open source phones (and TuxPhone, of course) in the New Scientist magazine. i see that the latest New Scientist issue (issue # 2542) carries this article.
obviously, we are very happy.
thanks Inman!

Etel presentation

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 23:44:26 -0800

Deva Seetharam

today i presented the tux-phone idea at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference in SFO .

here is the powerpoint file. File size is 2.24 MB - you are warned!

Rapid Prototyping of cases

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 11:38:34 -0800

Okay so alot of people out there are interested in the "making a case" bit of the project. I have to be honest. Presentation isn't my greatest interest unless i am being paid for it :-)

Okay, i got this great post from a Guy call Gregor in the Netherlands. Indeed if there is interest I might ask Gregor to contribute to this site. Let me know.
Hi Surj and Casey,


For my study of Industrial Design and Engineering I was looking for info on embedded systems and Gumstix-like projects. I found both your blogs greatly amusing, and found lots of great information. I also read you both look up to the physical engineering part of the project.



Spare ticket for ETel
Fri, 13 Jan 2006 15:02:52 -0800
Hi there,
As some of you know I am also helping to organise the O'Reilly Etel conference.
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/44/program.html
We had a journalist drop out and as such I have a spare pass with a free hotel room. Instead of letting it go to waste i thought i'd offer it as a giveaway.
I'll offer this to a reader of this blog who can attend with a demo, hack or similar. send a brief email to me at surj dot patel at gmail dot com. Failing that a really convincing story :-)
Hope to see you there :-)
We have Deva ( of course) , Shadowmite ( Treo 600 kernel), Casey Halverson and Nathan Seidle from Sparkfun there.


a quick update
Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:31:21 -0800
Deva Seetharam 
i hope the new year is treating you well. 
after a long time, i am posting an update. 
i have started writing a driver to interface the gm-862 hardware with the linux phone. i am trying to keep the kernel-space code as small as possible and implement most of the functionality in user-space. the (obvious) reasons being:

1. any misbehaving driver can bring down the whole system

2. kernel api changes often
i have also made a few small changes to application code. the code is available here.


Deva in India / Cool new module via Joshua Messer
Thu, 15 Dec 2005 10:53:47 -0800
Hi Guys,
Deva made a 7 minute call to me that i didnt understand a word of. He could hear me though. Some progress. Also he is away for two weeks and I am still wrangling the last of the conference together. I think he posted the code for the dialling as well. Hopefully he didnt leave my number in it :-)
Also got this email


Joshua Messer

More options	  Dec 14 (1 day ago)

Very interested in your phone hacking project, I wondered if you'd

seen this http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7219952184.html

It might be incredibly expensive, it might be more closed off than you



first words
Sun, 11 Dec 2005 22:55:36 -0800
Deva Seetharam 
today i added a speaker and a microphone to the tuxphone.  i called my cellphone                                                                                            from tuxphone. i can hear my cellphone clearly on tuxphone; i can barely hear the tuxphone on the cellphone.

i know the reason - the gm-862 hardware guide recommends a proper biasing circuitry for microphone. since i am  lazy and i wanted to see it work, i just used the simple test circuit suggested by sparkfun (http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/Port-O-Rotary/portable-rotary.htm).


First call
Sat, 10 Dec 2005 00:17:55 -0800
Deva Seetharam 
i am glad to report that the gumstix (with a breakout-gs) dialed my cellphone through gm-862 module. i just connected the STUART of gumstix to the gm-862 module to create the hardware interface. the  source code  is available for your review and use. 
(the code is available under the terms of GNU General Public License. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.)


Challenges in building a Linux cell phone
Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:46:10 -0800
Deva Seetharam 
as one could observe, building a linux phone prototype doesn't take more than the following (rather common) skills:

1. basic hardware skills

2. linux programming and device driver development skills

3. basic mechanical design skills
even the idea of building a cellular phone is not innovative.;  the SparkFun guys have built a  portable rotary phone  using the same gm862 cellular module and a pic microcontroller. 
the primary task involved in building this cell phone is assembling different components together. although it sounds simple, it is not an easy task since these components were not expected to operate/interface together.


TuxPhone Design Version 0.1
Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:38:15 -0800
Deva Seetharam 
here is the  initial design  of Tuxphone. (since i don't know how to embed images in drupal pages, i have included it as an external link.) 
the main components are:
1. Gumstix - this includes gumstix connex 400, cfstix and breakout-gs boards. cfstix is necessary since the main board may not have sufficient space to hold the application.

2. gm862 - this is the gm862-pcs module with cingular prepaid sim card.

3. LCD - this is HD44780U, a character LCD module. i am using a character lcd module since it is chip and uses less number of i/o pins than a graphic LCD module.