This time in my mini series of testing USB on the N810 tablet - I bring you external webcam. The following video shows mplayer playing v4l stream from the device. See details after the jump.

Nokia N810 + Creative webcam + USB OTG + mplayer on Vimeo.

All you need really, are the basics set up, and some custom modules and mplayer. This mplayer build is based on .24 and has no optimisations whatsoever. So don’t try to use it for anything else.

The module my Creative webcam uses is the ov511. Other modules are available also. Installation from the command prompt:

insmod ov511.ko

Mplayer starts the new video device from command prompt with the following:

mplayer-v4l -cache 128 -tv driver=v4l:width=420:height=240:outfmt=i420:device=/dev/video1 -vc rawi420 -vo xv tv://

Thanks to google and brainwagon fro the syntax.

ps. You might have to try a few times before the video looks right. Sometimes I get only b/w or some weird colors.

As promised in my previous post. So this one was a bit harder to implement, because I couldn’t find working kernel modules, and had to compile them myself. There is a good discussion about arduino in ITT forums, and other blog posts, but still this was something I wanted to try.

I know this is and old topic by blogging standards, but because I found so simple and cheap to use external usb flash-drives with N810, I decided to write a quick walktrough.

1. Get yourself a female-female usb adapter. I ordered from this funny sounding store on eBay, and it took 1-2weeks for it to ship to Finland. Total cost: 2-3€ delivered. Plus the package is often very pretty if you order from Hong Kong Just search for example “usb female to female adapter” and sort by price.
2. Install Kate’s usb-otg-plugin.
3. Select host mode.
4. connect your usb cable, adapter and the flash drive.
5. Enjoy the warm pseudohackerish glow deep inside…

This image shows dmsg output after connecting the drive. My N810 opened the file manager automatically upon connecting. The USB flash key is a 2GB Kingston DataTraveller Mini.

Next up arduino….

A few days back there was great a blog post by linuxuk.org about syncing GPE Calendar with Google calendar and further with Outlook.

I wanted to try just the GPE Calendar to Google synchronization on OS2008 , and realised that it needed some fiddling to get it working. Here are the steps:

1. Find and decide where to get GPE Calendar from. I ended up using repository:
   http://www.cobb.uk.net/apt/ chinook user

2. Then there’s the libsoup dependency. This I achieved by using repository:
   http://maemo.o-hand.com/packages/ chinook/ [empty]

3. Install GPE Calendar from application manager.
4. Install some python dependencies from the root terminal:
   apt-get install python2.5 python2.5-gtk2 python2.5-hildon python2.5-xml

5. Follow the erminig instructions by downloading and istalling gdatalite, pysqlite and erminig.
6. Remeber that when entering Google calendar password in erminig, the first letter wants to be uppercase. The program won’t tell you if you have a wrong password. sigh…

It’s a long list, but when you get it to work, you’ll be happy. It works just fine. If it doesn’t, remember to try to start it from the terminal to see the output.

Most of the problems I figured out by reading the erminig forum, and the repositories I found from the repository search tool. If you have better instructions or tips please share them in the comments.

I was playing around with gps-software on the N810 and decided to try how hard it would be to make a simple perl-script that uses the gpsd on OS2008. As a side note: I really don’t know perl at all, and don’t even like it - I actually hate it for some reason…

I decided to go with Charles Curleys gpsdate-script that uses gpsd to show the UTC time from the satellites. I hoped it would be a simple task, but actually I had to resolve some dependency issues. Seven to be exact.

To get this script working, I had to get additional perl modules, distributions and whatnot, but it was quite simple by searching and downloading in search.cpan.org. I probably could have used perls automatic download functionality, but even if I could, I didn’t want to fill my devices innards with endless perl-libraries. I wanted some control. I just downloaded these “packages” and used the -I/lib/dir/here switch:

• GPS-PRN
• Geo-Constants
• Geo-Ellipsoids
• Geo-Functions
• Geo-Forward
• Geo-Inverse
• Net-GPSD

One might argue that I could have gotten to the same outcome by not using Net-GPSD and it’s dependencies, but I think that by going this route there’s more functionality available for future fiddling.

I modified the original source by removing some command-line argument handling to get rid of Getopt::Std. So this is a dirty hack all around

To make it work, make sure gpsd is running (by starting maps for instance) and run the script from console:

/media/mmc2/tmp/gpsdate $ perl -I./includes gpsdate.pl
/gpsdate.pl: It is 22:31:30.00, 2008-01-14, UTC.

You can download the modified script and the dependencies here.

I finally got my N810 and I’m really pleased with it. It looks nice, feels nice and works like a charm. Thanks Nokia.

However, there’s one thing that puzzles me. Why can’t you force the brightness of the screen to go to maximum. Even if you set the screen brightness to it’s max, it still goes brighter when the light sensor on the upper-left corner of the device detects a bright light. This can be demonstrated for example with a flashlight.

I understand that it saves energy, and there’s the added feel of readability in bright light, but still it would be nice to have a checkbox in display settings for the adaptive display functionality.

What do you think, or have I missed something?

Update (5.1.2008 02:35):
Confirmation mail came from Nokia, codes should now work for: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom. Canadians have more info next week. But thank you Nokia for the discount and the device!

After Jan Jansen’s blog post I decided to do some clicking around Nokia’s online shops. It seems that the N810 is available for order from all of the shops listed on this page.

This should be a surprise at least for Finnish customers, because as seen in the following pictures N810 shouldn’t be available yet.

Nseries.com (location finland):

Nokia Nseries Online Shop:

http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/ Is still pretty much unreachable, but I’m beginning to feel that there’s something more to it than people upgrading their OS to 2008.

Because for me http://repository.maemo.org/ and http://repository.maemo.org/extras are also 95% of the time unreachable. Is this a classical case of Nokia not paying the ransom and getting the internet hammer also known as DDOS? Share your own thoughts

PS. Happy Holidays!

In the latest MikroPC-magazine (14/2007) there’s a small article by Veli-Matti Jalovaara about WiMAX.

“Nokia will be using Intel’s WiMAX-chipsets in the upcoming N-series tablets, which are meant to be in the market next year”

For me this was news, but after a quick session with google it seems that this in an old story. Anyways, linuxdevices.com makes an interesting notion: “Intel and Nokia partnered on WiMAX as early as 2005 — months before the launch of Nokia’s original Linux-based 770 Internet tablet.” Maybe the goal has always been to make a device that can connect itself to a long-range network like wimax. Will this change the way we see these tablets? For me they’re not yet always-connected devices by nature, even though I theoretically could keep the DUN-connection to my phone always on.

Is it possible to use N810 as a bluetooth GPS module? For example GPS might be needed on a laptop, or to test a cellphone application. At first the idea seems a bit stupid, but I’m sure someone somewhere might appreciate the functionality.

I’m pretty sure it won’t work out of the box, but creating an application that acts as BT SPP server that just outputs data from gpsd might work. I’m not familiar with BT-programming, so would this be possible or even “easy”?