Neo900 - finally a successor of N900

[joerg_rw]

Originally Posted by ste-phan

Geiger counter a la Polimaster.

Geiger Mueller is an electron tube which won't fit into this formfactor. That Polithingie however seems to be a scintillation counter and that fits for all I know. There once been a business card sized scinti with a height of some 3mm, powered by a Litium primary battery for 10 years continuous on, on think-geek.com . Never again seen it. Also been expensive, the scinti crystal is very hard to create and delicate to handle.

seems a proper project for the prototyping area. BTW such project will always be possible with mugen cover and exploiting then expansion connectors. I'm amazed I haven't heard same suggestion for TOH yet.

/j

[biketool]

Joerg, I suppose my tone was more pessimistic than required.
Mainly I wanted access to the layout files to try to hack in a VHF/UHF radio. Unlikely that is true but not impossible bloat.
The downside is that the people designing and manufacturing need to break even without every fab in China grabbing and producing counterfeit Neo900s.
BTW I have gotten multi layer SM PCBs that were small lot printed for very small DIY amateur radio QRP transciever kits.

[foobar]

Originally Posted by biketool

Mainly I wanted access to the layout files to try to hack in a VHF/UHF radio.

From what I understand (and I'm not in the EE business, so take that with a grain of salt) what will be available will be the schematics that you can print and pin on the wall and tinker with, but NOT the final PCB layouts which will be used to do the actual etching.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

[ishijoe]

Thanks a lot to everyone involved in this communities project. Yesterday, I was thinking of what could be the sucessor to my refurbished N900 and I was trying to convince myself to switch to Android. Out of the blue, I decided to visit the maemo site(as if guided by an invisble force ) and discovered this thread.
This really shows the true power of a community and the desire to extend the life of the N900/maemo(my precious !!!).
Every time, friends brag about the features of their latest phones (it's always iphone vs android), I always argues that their phones do not have Infrared. They always laugh at me. But deep inside myself, I understand the real power of my N900 and its community.
I can't see my life without my N900 because I love the power of commandline. For my multimedia purpose, I use mplayer and C*mus(both commandline apps). This is just one example.
Anyway, what I am trying to say that I am willing to pay the price to improve and to extend the N900. Any extras will be welcomed.

[biketool]

Originally Posted by foobar

From what I understand (and I'm not in the EE business, so take that with a grain of salt) what will be available will be the schematics that you can print and pin on the wall and tinker with, but NOT the final PCB layouts which will be used to do the actual etching.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes that exactly per Joerg_RW.

[joerg_rw]

Originally Posted by foobar

From what I understand (and I'm not in the EE business, so take that with a grain of salt) what will be available will be the schematics that you can print and pin on the wall and tinker with, but NOT the final PCB layouts which will be used to do the actual etching.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

You even get the complete layout as pdf, when I'm not mistaken about what Nikolaus said. What we will NOT hand out are the project files that are needed only for the factory to produce new PCB. It's like with cookies you can have the complete recipe but NOT the software program that controls our robot bakery. You couldn't use it for anything we like you to do anyway.

/j

[dos1]

Hello everybody!

I think you all will be interested in small update we made on our website

http://neo900.org/

[jonwil]

Regarding audio on the Neo900, if we want to be compatible with all the bits of Fremantle that deal in audio (including phone calls, media playback, Skype and recording) we are going to have to deal with the proprietary blobs in pulseaudio-nokia.
These blobs and the proprietary algorithms they contain are tied specifically to the Nokia N900 audio hardware.

In order for these proprietary algorithms (including audio tuning, mudrc, stw, xprot speaker protection, equalizer, AEP and others) to keep working properly, we need to use the same audio architecture as the N900 used. Specifically we need to use the same audio chip (tvl320aic34) and possibly (depending on the way these algorithms work) other N900 components like the speakers and microphone (for example, xprot is probably tied to the characteristics of the N900 speakers, possibly other parts of pulseaudio-nokia are tied to headphone/speakers/microphone/other bits of the system)

For one thing, pulseaudio-nokia is talking directly to the tvl320aic24 via /sys/devices/platform/omap-mcbsp.2/*

We will already have to figure out how to handle libcmtspeech (closed library that handles cellular audio which is linked statically into module-nokia-voice) as well as anything in pulseaudio-nokia that is specific to the parameters and functioning of the N900 cellular modem, bluetooth audio, TV out audio and FMRX/FMTX. Having to completly reverse engineer pulseaudio-nokia to talk to a different audio pipeline that has totally different characteristics would be nigh-on impossible.

[joerg_rw]

thanks a lot jonwil, for the clarification. I couldn't have put it any better. It's absolutely evident that we need to use tvl320aic34, or the fremantle compatibility project goal will definitely fail to get reached ever. I'm less concerned about other parts like amps, speakers etc, since those have few or no idiosyncrasies that couldn't get dealt with on driver level. But the codec is a complex bit of hardware, even so complex that linux mixers frequently get it wrong and don't present all available channels and mixer settings for codecs/mixers/audiocards that are not completely mainstream.

[biketool]

Was there ever consensus on whether the fail modem on the N900 was a software or a 100% hardware issue. If it is a software issue the new modem blob will hopefully fix that, if hardware I hope that the new manufacturing run will address that.
I think the new lead free PCB soldering/tinning process has been improving but it is at least partly responsible for problems on the N900 like the USB port and possibly the modem coming loose and requiring pressing down.