Not Nearly Enough Time

Nokia's Fumble, HP's Huge Opportunity

I had a pretty nasty day Friday as I suppose many Qt developers did.

There are suddenly a huge number of Qt developers out there who have no mobile platform.  HP and WebOS has a huge opportunity here. These devs are not going to go to .NET in any significant numbers.

If WebOS adopts Qt as a native-code platform, or even just as an alternate but supported framework... wow. Just think of it. They should take quick advantage of Nokia's massive betrayal and give these guys a home.

Nokia's marketing on Qt pre-Friday has a basis in fact.  Qt is an awesome platform to develop on, and it gives you instant support for a huge range of different OS targets. That attracts a lot of developers. At the time, I thought Nokia's purchase of Trolltech was so good it could have been divinely inspired.

They fumbled, though. They were too tied to Symbian, and they spent way too much effort there instead of on MeeGo. I don't know how much was down to politics... but surely it would have been a whole lot less painful to drop Symbian for MeeGo than what they just did.

Elop seems to fancy that his platform was burning, and he had to jump. I'd rather imagine that he saw fire and jumped in the only lifeboat, leaving the crew to burn. He could have grabbed a bucket, you know.

I don't blame Elop, really. He went with what he knew. For all I know... he was brought on specifically to do this by meddling financiers.

Instead of insisting on Elop, the finance guys should have insisted on a UI visionary to actually lead MeeGo to greatness.

Oh well. Opportunity lost. The ball's on the ground at HP's feet.

Pick it up, man!

 

(Oh, and don't worry about Nokia owning Qt... Fork it, rename it. It's even easier than what Google did with Java for Android. The KDE devs are probably going to fork Qt anyway)

Qt on the Palm Pre

So here it is:

 

Background

A client of ours, 1st Detect, is developing a miniature chemical detector.  This is a fairly cool bit of technology that will help sniff out the nasty stuff in airports, factories, battlefields, etc.

A while back we took the software for that system and converted it to Qt.  This was so that a single board computer running the chemical detector could run Linux, while maintaining the option to go back to Windows if they had to.  (We also have it running on a Mac)

A nice side effect of this was that mobile platforms became easy.  We did a quick proof of concept remote control / view application on a Nokia 5800 phone running Symbian (They of course gave me permission to blog about this):

 

The app searches for nearby chemical detectors, lets you connect to them, and control them.  We've got GPS working now (the test version pops up your location in Google Maps), and we're working on a display that will show you nearby detectors on a map, with their status.  All from your phone / mobile device.  Nice, eh?

Well...  almost.   The regular conference goers at 1st Detect don't have Nokia phones.  They wanted something that worked on something they had, and they figured that eventually clients will have the same issue.  So, we looked into getting the Qt-based app running on a Palm Pre.

After some initial tests, it began to look like this would most likely work.

I thought it'd make an excellent blog post, so I contacted Nokia about it.  I wanted to know how serious they were about Qt Everywhere.  The intention was that if they weren't too thrilled about Qt on a competitor's phone then we'd simply do 1st Detect's Qt app on the Pre and not really talk about it.

I figured I owed them for releasing Qt as LGPL.

I didn't quite expect the reaction.

They were THRILLED.  They were going to the Mobile World Congress the next week, and they really wanted to be able to show that off.

I had 3 days to get some Qt demo apps running on it.  I ran out and bought a Pre and got started.  It was a lot of fun.

Oh, and here's our client's app running on the Pre (yes, that's WebKit):

Mission accomplished.

Here's how.

The Process

First things first...  I needed a way to load packages and interact with the Pre.  I always prefer VMs for that sort of thing, so I created a VirtualBox Ubuntu 9.10 i386 VM.

The Palm Pre is a very open platform.  There's a developer mode, which is enabled with a simple password-like phrase in the search box.  A root linux shell is then accessed by simply running a terminal from a Palm-provided package.  How cool is that?  That is OPEN.

I had a simple Qt app running on the Palm Pre before this, with no screen, keyboard, or touchscreen plugins.  This was our initial test.  We had to kill the Pre's GUI (Luna) to run it, but it worked.  A little investigating showed the keyboard would be fairly easy.  A homebrew game on the Pre we were familiar with (Doom) ran fully integrated within Luna using the SDL libraries on the Pre, so we figured this was the way to go.

Over the next day or so, I got the SDL plugin to work.  The keyboard plugin was very similar to the one on the Kindle port.  The touchscreen turned out to be fairly easy using SDL as well.

Thursday, I started trying to find some Qt demos that would look good, and I started to get them running on the Pre.

Crisis!  My laptop came screeching to a halt with an unrecoverable disk error.  We keep all source code in source control, but this Palm Pre work hadn't quite made it in yet.  (I don't seem to like checking in highly fluid code)

I ran to Fry's and bought a new laptop drive, then used ddrescue to clone it from the old drive and attempt a recover on the bad sectors.

It turns out that only a single 1K block on the disk went bad, somewhere in the Palm Pre VM disk image.  I quickly created a new VM (which gave me a chance to test my instructions for Nokia) and I was back in business again.

The whole episode lost me 8 precious hours that beforehand I fully expected to have available (2.5 hours were just driving to Fry's and back in rush hour traffic).  So, I ended up sending the instructions and install packages to Nokia at 2am in the morning.

Nokia reported that the install went very smoothly, and everything worked great.  They've also mentioned it on the Qt blog.

Get it on Preware

The Qt libraries and these demo applications are now available on Preware!  Keep in mind this is only for the Palm Pre and Palm Pre Plus.  It very likely will not work on the Pixi.

Install the "Qt Framework" package there, and any Qt demos you'd like to check out.

The plugin code is now released on the LGPL 2.1 license, to match Qt.  It can be found on qt.gitorious.org (git clone git://gitorious.org/~darronb/qt/qt-palm-pre.git).

A Little Evangelism

Qt is an excellent platform, and I find more to like about it every week.  Wouldn't it be great if every smartphone ran it?  Don't just dream about it.  Make it happen!

I just read about MeeGo, the combination of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin efforts.  Qt will be the default UI platform for this...  very good news.

Of course, I'm currently mostly doing desktop work with it...  so it's awesome for that, too.

Go ahead, get involved!  Qt is exploding.

Hacking the Amazon Kindle DX, Part 2: Qt and Sudoku

Get your apps for Kindle, right now!

I've compiled the Qt software platform for the Kindle...  and I've written plugins for the e-ink display, the keyboard, and the fiveway.

On this platform, I've created a great little sample app: Sudoku! Free Edition.

• 5 difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard, fiendish, and diabolical)
• 250 pregenerated boards (in the free edition)
• Custom mode to add your own game (from your local newspaper, for instance)
• Optional autofill of scratch marks
• Strategy view mode to easily see potential locations for each number
• Save and load as often as you want (keep that hard one for later)
• Automatically saves where you were when you last played

   
    

DISCLAIMER: This software is released AS-IS with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. Use of this software (and the Qt environment) may violate the terms of your Kindle service and/or warranty.  Also, the Qt environment may interfere with future Kindle software updates from Amazon.  The installation of this software indicates your knowledge and acceptance of these risks.

The Qt environment and Sudoku only add new features not previously present in the Kindle platform-- they do not replace or supercede standard Kindle functionality.  They are not derivative works but are instead transformative in nature.

ACCEPTABLE USES: The Sudoku! Free Edition game is for personal use only, do not redistribute it.  The Qt platform proof-of-concept plugins are LGPL licensed and can therefore be used with your own Kindle apps, personal or commercial. (as long as you follow the terms of that license)

Read these terms and click to download: I ACCEPT THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS

UPDATE:I've made the LGPL-licensed source code available, as well as a build folder for building the packages themselves (based on others' great packager work). There is also a new set of packages available on the download page linked to above that may work with the newer firmware versions. (Let me know if they work, and if there's no trouble I'll remove the older packages)

You must follow these steps:

1. Plug in your Kindle to your computer and copy the Qt platform update package (update_install_qt_xxx.bin, for example) to it's top level folder.  Eject and disconnect the Kindle.
2. Go to the settings page, and choose "Update your Kindle" from the menu.  Press OK if a warning dialog pops up.
3. Plug in your Kindle again and copy the plugins package to your Kindle (update_install_kindleqtplugins_xxx.bin).  Eject and disconnect the Kindle.
4. Go to the settings page again and choose "Update your Kindle" from the menu.  Press OK on the warning dialog to do the install.
5. Once this is done, RESTART YOUR KINDLE.  The "restart" after the update isn't good enough.  Go back to the settings page, and choose "Restart".  This is necessary to get the hotkey manager running normally.
6. Now copy the Sudoku install package (update_install_sudoku_xxx.bin, for example) the same way you did the Qt platform package in step 1.
7. Run the "Update your Kindle" process from the settings page again.
8. You're done!  Try the hotkeys:
9. • S + U to play Sudoku (shuts down the framework, then restarts it when done)
   • R + S + T reboots the Kindle
   • N + F shuts down the normal Kindle framework
   • F + W restarts the normal Kindle framework
   • U + D runs a little update display script that may not appear to do anything
   • S + C captures the screen and saves it in a folder called screenshots as screenN.jpg
   NOTE: once a hotkey is activated, you must wait 10 seconds before another hotkey will work.

Background

Once I received my Kindle DX, I quickly discovered that it is actually a Linux device with a ~533Mhz ARM processor.  (It's actually a little embarrassing I didn't know that beforehand).  To me, that just screamed Qt/Embedded.  I was really itching to write some plugins ever since I saw the base classes in the Qt docs.  It's good practice...  I'll probably need to do something similar on a future embedded project.

Compiling Qt for the Kindle

After about a day of work, I figured out how to get Qt compiled.  Most of that time was just getting Scratchbox set up properly with the right toolchain.  I also had to create a VirtualBox VM with Ubuntu 9.10 x86 (32bit), since I run 64bit on the laptop.  (as a bonus, using VMs keeps your main system nice and clean)

Once the cross-compiling environment was set up, it was actually easier to compile Qt for the Kindle than to do the same for VS2005. 

Qt Platform Package Overview

After being compiled, the Qt libs were copied it over to the Kindle.  They're a little too big for the small system partitions on the Kindle, so they were placed on the /mnt/us partition.  That makes it visible when the Kindle is plugged in USB, which isn't ideal.  It works, though.

The hotkey manager was added as the main way to run apps using the Qt platform.  This will look for any multi-key combinations and run any existing scripts in the hotkey-scripts folder.  The script names must have the keys in alphabetic order.  It also won't trigger more than one script every 10 seconds.

The screenshot utility is just dumping the framebuffer at /proc/eink_fb/virtual_fb with the standard Linux dd command, and converting that raw data into JPEG with a simple command- line Qt app.  Please don't abuse this utility.  I find it very useful, and I hope developers who may end up using this Qt platform will use it to demonstrate what they've accomplished.

The fiveway plugin by default acts like a mouse...  which so far is a pretty poor way to navigate on the Kindle.  By passing in a "keypad" plugin option (Sudoku! uses this), it transitions over to cursor key mode.  There's a script called fivewayspeedup which takes one parameter: either on or off.  When enabled, it will tweak the auto-repeat settings for the fiveway to act a little more like a mouse.  It's still a last resort interface.

Rationale

This is about using my favorite software platform everywhere I can.  It's a gorgeous library, and I hope it does well.

Qt Everywhere!

Hacking the Amazon Kindle DX, Part 1: Bluetooth Shell

I got an Amazon Kindle DX for XMas.  I wanted one mostly for viewing device datasheets (PDF).

I should say I do like the Kindle, and I will keep it (anyway there's no choice now).   However, the PDF viewer is very disappointing.

Really, that disappointment is mostly for one reason: No table of contents!  I don't know who uses PDFs without TOC... it's terrible! In the past, I've passed up ICs in the chip selection process for products/projects solely because they had datasheets without TOCs.

So, Amazon...  no TOC support?  Seriously?

Anyway...  I decided to start hacking on it and see what happened.  I found a great forum at MobileRead, with exactly what I was looking for.  (thanks, Jyavenard)  It's a hack that more or less re-enabled a leftover QA test mode on the Kindle, and ultimately let me telnet into a shell on the Kindle over USB.

However, I started to get concerned about bricking it.  What's the first thing you should do when worrying about damaging your new toy?  Take it apart, of course!  :)

The little gray bezel was the hardest part.  Once I figured out how to get that off the Kindle DX, the rest was quick work with a screwdriver.  (Although it really was a ridiculous number of screws...  did I mention I lost one?)

I should pause here to note that this is about the point my wife walked in.  Case off, screws and bezel lying to the side, hunched over it with a voltmeter...  *sigh*

So, what to do? Well, the point of opening it was really just to get to the one known serial port that gives you bootloader, recovery, and Linux console access. Basically, what this guy did.

However, I didn't want holes in my kindle or wires hanging around. So, what about that nice little Bluetooth module I just finished playing with as a slave device for my Nokia phone? You know, SparkFun's Bluetooth Mate?  It converts any TTL-level RS232 serial interface into a Bluetooth connection.

Great stuff, eh? 

First things first... space needed to be made for it.  Since I wanted easy access to it (eventually I need some way to turn it on and off) I chose to put it just under the gray bezel.

You can see the paper and tape I added to cover some unpopulated resistor pads. The Kindle DX does NOT appear to be conformal coated at all, so all these pads are potential shorting points! The internal cover needed cutting out to fit over the Bluetooth module:

So, how does it fit?

You can see the wires I routed to it. The three large pads in the middle of the Kindle are GND, RX, and TX. The Bluetooth Mate has an internal 3.3V regulator. The fourth pad is probably power, but it reads 2.8V. I could bypass the Bluetooth Mate's regulator, but the Roving Networks module on it wants 3-3.6V. I found about 4V (battery voltage) on one side of the wakeup switch. So, I passed that in to the Bluetooth Mate's voltage regulator. However, the Bluetooth Mate does voltage translation back up to the input voltage, and I didn't want the 4V going to the serial port, when it's IO lines seem to idle at 2.8V. So, I modified the Bluetooth Mate to pull TX up to the regulated 3.3V rail instead of the 4V input. This is probably very important. I don't know what kind of voltage the serial port can handle, but 4V is very likely too much.

With the gray bezel back on it looks completely untouched.

I created a new user 'ppp' on the Kindle, and set it up to launch pppd on login.  Getting ppp to work took some fiddling, but I eventually got it right.  I ended up putting my own compile of a ssh server on it, created a ssh key, and voila!

I can now connect via Bluetooth, and I have a wireless network connection to my Kindle DX!

Now hacking on it is easier than ever.

Note: The Bluetooth module unconnected must always listen for connections.  So, it's drawing 20-30 mA of power at all times.  (It is counter-intuitively using less power when it's connected, since the module and your PC can agree on when to wake up to talk)  It turns out that this idle current may be more than double what the Kindle DX uses on it's own (when idle), so I'm dramatically shortening the battery life.  However, it's still about four days...  down from over a week or two.  I may address that issue later.

Qt for Symbian

I've been having a lot of fun lately learning how to write Qt apps for my new phone, the Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition.

Two clients have expressed interest in at least proof-of-concept ports of the Qt applications I am doing for them to the Symbian mobile phone platform. So, it's a great excuse to learn something new and interesting.

It's been somewhat painful, as the Qt for Symbian port is brand new (officially came out of beta status on the 7th) and documentation on various important bits isn't very complete yet. For example, my QSslSocket test would not work on the phone until I figured out I had to mark the app as using the NetworkServices capability. Even then, it took me a little while to figure out how to add that... the standard Nokia dev environment's (Carbide) place to do that was an autogenerated file in Qt for Symbian, and I couldn't find the source. (.pro file TARGET.CAPABILITY entries)

An easily referenced Qt documentation page on what classes/member functions require specific Symbian capabilities would be very useful.

I have also picked up a Roving Networks RN-41-based Bluetooth module from SparkFun (which is a great place for all kinds of hobbyist electronics projects) and modified the Nokia "Bluetooth Point to Multipoint Example" to connect to it! I only chose the Bluetooth mate over the BlueSMiRF Gold because the latter was out of stock. Apparently the only difference is the pinout.

So, I can now actually use the Nokia phone as a master, to query or command some kind of local bluetooth-based device... I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but it's cool! :)