Openmoko GPS Software and Hardware

18 Jul 2008 – Madrid

The great thing about an open-source phone, like openmoko, is that when there’s a problem, all the community can gather to find a solution.

At the beginning of the week, some people complained that they couldn’t get their phone GPS working: Time To First Fix signal (the initial signal that tell the phone where in the world it is) was taking infinite time when a SD card was inserted.

Then some people joined the thread on the community mailing list to confirm the problem (other people joined just to complain, not helping much), and after a bunch of test, the source of the problem was confined on the SD card reader.
h2. Software solution

After 24h, the OpenMoko team released a software solution to the problem, stopping the SD card reader internal clock just the time to get the TTFF signal, about 40 seconds, then everything would be back to normal.

The patch has been directly available on the project git repository, allowing the mos furious to recompile and reflash their phone in hours, the others waited for the daily build. Imagine that, you get everyday a new build for your phone, without waiting for the infamous version 2.0 vaporware that might come out one day.

People have tested it, it works for many, but there’s still some phones that don’t have it.

Hardware solution

This morning, the OpenMoko hardware team published their hardware solution

Soldering a 10pF capacitor between PIN5 and PIN6 at SD card slot without taking off the case as the below picture showed.

That might be a bit difficult for anyone to get access to a pico-capacitor and solder it at this tiny place, but at least it’s accessible for most of the soldering geeks.

So at the end, you’ve got a phone that’s so open that you’ve got a software and hardware solution of a production problem in a week. Of course, it’s not a consumer-ready phone, it would have been a complete disaster to recall all the phones, that’s just a bunch of geeks today that can touch this phone, but someday, you’ll have it in your hand, and you’ll just have to imagine all the open-source work that float inside.

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