Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Good news on Gemei x760+


Today I installed the serial console connector on the Gemei x760+ and had a chance to examine the hardware a bit better. I would say that except for the buttons and the LCD the hardware is exactly equal. Same CPU, same SDRAM, same FM chip, same TV-out chip, etc.

I tried to boot dingux straight to SDRAM vía USB boot mode and everything worked, except that the kernel paniced because I had no SD/MMC card inserted and thus no rootfs in place. I could see the LCD backlight blinking, so the same GPIO pin is used to control it.

As I mentioned in the previous post test point 1 (TP1) is the console TX signal, and I confirmed that test point 2 (TP2) is the RX signal.

So, we should have dingux runing on the x760+ in a few weeks. All that's needed is map the GPIO pins (if different from A320) and disassemble the hardware initialization code in the unbricker tool to get the LCD initialization code.

I would say the donated money has been put to good use :-). Thank you all again.

Offtopic UPDATE 1: I see a problem coming: the lack of start and select keys. On one side, you know that the dingus kernel uses power+start+whatever for special functions (volume, brightness, reboot, etc). On the other side, developers have been porting applications and using the very convenient start and select keys. I would like to hear suggestions on how do deal with that. Besides up/down/left/right and the four "action" buttons, the x760+ has only power and reset buttons.

Offtopic UPDATE 2: I was wrong in the previous post: the x760+ indeed has a power button (not slider), and does charge through USB.
Posted by at 10:17 PM

10 comments:

  2. Good for you! Please also, dont' forget visit my Dingoo blog site!
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  3. Hi BooBoo, the gemei uses a system of combo of buttons to compensate the lack of buttons. What about using combinations like power + up and power + down for brightness, power + left and power + right for volume? You could use a combination of buttons in order to boot the dingux.
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  4. I had the same problem as you. Whenever I tried to run Dingux since the early versions, I had Kernel Panic (LCD blinking). About the keys, I igree with Tiago. The best solution is the use keys combinations for these functions and for boot selection: Power + X.
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  5. How many buttons does the Gemei x760+ have?
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  7. When using emulation the x760+ has keys binded like power+triangle for start and power+square for select things like that perhaps you could bind buttons in a similer way to make up for the fewer buttons.
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  8. Well, because of the lack ofo options, maybe "combo buttons" should be the answer, just like eraldo said!
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  9. So nothing became true of this promise :P
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  10. If you've read the latest posts, I should have by now everything needed to get dingux working on the x760+ (courtesy of ChinaChip), and I'm working on it. Just can't afford to throw as many hours at it as I'd like.
    ReplyDelete

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