How to grow and scale the project?

historical

Hi!

As you can see, there is not really that much progress throughout the last 2
weeks or so.  Dieter and myself were the only two who actually looked at how
to driver the DSP, TPU and RF hardware, write the drivers for it and the
existing layer1 code.  Now we're both busy with other (paid) work, and
the project almost seems stuck.

I would like to see this change.  I'm quite sure there are some other folks
on this list who would be interested in diving in those lower layer bits
of the system.  However, I also understand there is not all too much that
can be done without running your own non-hopping BTS (as we don't do frequency
hopping at the moment).  So a working OpenBTS, OpenBSC setup or something
like a CMD55 or Racal 6103 are a precondition.

Nonetheless, a number of people on this list have access to those devices.

I'd like to encourage some other people to also look at this and remove the
dependence on Dieter and myself in that area.

Furthermore, members of the IRC channel have certainly noticed the growing
interest in a potential port to the Mediatek chipset based devicees.  Mediatek
is churning out more than 95 million chipsets every quarter, so there is plenty
of phones around.

The data sheets, reference schematics and other training materials can easily
be found on a lot of chinese developer websites - as is the Mediatek SDK.
However, the critical layer1 and DSP API part is only provided in object code,
and the documentation does not document it.

Still I believe it is feasible.  So if you want to stay out of the GSM part,
feel like the Calypso is too boring for you: Why not work on getting a minimal
custom software image for the MT622x running, including bootloader support,
keypad/touchscreen and graphics output?  If that is done by the wider
community, the so-called experts can focus on looking at the GSM side of things
once they have time.

Even on the Calypso there are many tasks that still need to be finished,
including battery charging, power management, file system, SIM Card API,
etc.

If you know somebody who understands C development for microcontrollers and
wants to help building the worlds first Free Software GSM baseband chipset
software, please motivate them to join.  We can really need every helping hand
we get.

Happy hacking,
	Harald
-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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