[WLANware] SoC Applicant

[Charles Boyd]

Hi Mitar!

I am not accustomed with it. Is it a full-blown emulator? So you will
> be able to run OLSR in it? You do not have N900? Definitely is good to
> test it on hardware. But I think it is also possible to get some
> sponsored N900.


Scratchbox is a cross-compiling tool, so anything I can get to compile and
run under Scratchbox (correctly configured) should compile and run just the
same on an actual N900. It uses your native compiler to produce binaries
that are intended to run on another platform, and then it uses the toolchain
to run them "natively".

If I worked on that project, I would find a way to get a real N900 to test
on throughout the whole process.

Which Android phone do you have?


I am currently using the Motorola Droid. Would this project require a Dev
phone?

Maybe you could do only Android GUI and somebody else would do N900 GUI and
> you would cooperate.


Sure! Doing it that way is actually more interesting, and I am more familiar
with the Android platform than I am with the N900. I imagine there isn't a
great deal of complexity with coding for the N900 since (as I understand
it), the N900 can run applications from ARM debian packages with minimal
modification.

Would the GUI for the N900 be programmed in C or Java? I know there is a JVM
for Maemo, but the OLSRd port would definitely be in C (like the system
underlying it).

That is, would the GUI for the two projects actually be sharing any amount
of code (with modifications) - or will they be sharing an abstract design
goal?

In general, I think the idea of a GUI for OLSRd is really interesting - and
there is much to be done in developing that by itself. Porting it to Android
and N900 are just icing on the cake. I will have to learn a lot about how to
develop for Android and work closely with routing protocols, but I've been
meaning to do both of those things for a while since I use them quite a bit
and see ways to improve them or use them in new ways.

To answer your question briefly - Yes, I would gladly take on building the
OLSR GUI for Android and collaborate with the N900 team for the sake of
consistency between the two separate ports.

It also occurred to me that I could contribute by (1) translating/re-writing
some of the existing relevant documentation on the wiki to English and (2)
creating new content on the wiki as our work develops and requires some
technical reference that users and other developers will need to make the
most out of what we produce.

Do you think that would be worthwhile? I've been checking out a lot of
articles on the freifunk wiki through google translate (and some rough
German), but autotranslate tools are pretty bad. I would be able to
translate important sections and articles literally, and with other things I
would just write similar articles (same basic information and section
titles, etc.) but in my own words in English.

Do you think this would be worthwhile? Could/Should I start working on that
immediately? I think writing content to the wiki (related to this project in
particular) would be a good way to familiarize myself with the tools that I
would be working with. Translating wiki articles would be a kind of
preliminary study.


But it would be great to pack it in a stand-alone package (for rooted
> phones) which

will have to enable ad-hoc mode (for different Android WiFi hardware),

set IP and other network configuration and make an interface to OLSR.


Yes! It would be a lot of fun to test out too!

Android has great built-in support with Google Maps, it would be interesting
to add a layer that shows regularly-updated network activity in the Maps
view. I've done some work previously with the Google Maps API (I made some
simple PHP scripts that incorporated it for a job I used to work at), so
that is a specific GUI feature I can think of that I would like to work on.

The GPS and seamless incorporation of Google Maps makes Android a very
powerful platform for building ad-hoc networking tools.

Many of this things will have to be workaround/hacks into the Android system
> around officially supported things so quite some research will be necessary
> to find the most benign (and future-proof) way of doing it. Ah, yes, and
> there are different versions of Android. So this is also something to play
> with.


What parts of the android OS pose significant problems?  I've been reading
through some of the API on the Android developer website, it would be good
to know what in particular to take note of.

By the way, I am regularly idling in #freifunk on Freenode. I'm also
regularly in #android and #android-dev. My IRC handle is "bezdomni".

Thanks for your response! :)

-Charles
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