Wild ducks project
From Symbian Developer Community
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Background and Mission
A recurring topic at the Stammtisch has been how we can enable community members everywhere to build their own hardware device running the Symbian Platform. With the platform now open source, this is finally possible. But before we can expect the community to innovate with the platform, we must prove that it is actually possible for an individual or a small group of people to build a device on it.
So we set out to build our own phone, with open off-the-shelf hardware, and the latest Symbian PDK. We call this the Wild Ducks Project. These wiki pages describe what we have done and how we did it.
There is a nice video introduction to the project made by All About Symbian .
Get Involved!
We would love to hear from the community members, exchange ideas and help each other out in improving the project and the information provided. A good place to ask questions this is the Wild Ducks thread in the Community Project forum. There is also an email list if you want to take part in technical discussions.
Even better, why don't you build your own Symbian phone and help us improve the Beagle Board support? For a list of concrete problems for you to start working on, see the TODO page.
To get started have a look at the hardware and the software sections.
Goals
This project has a number of high level goals:
- Prove that the Symbian platform is fully open and that it works "out of the box" on open hardware
- Provide a complete hardware and software stack for the community to build on and experiment with
- Keep the hardware cost as low as possible
- Document the entire process, so the work is reproducible by community members
- Provide a foundation for further community projects
- Build community relations
- Sample pizza
Progress
This project was kicked off the last week before Christmas 2009. Our stated goal was to be able to make a phone call with the all open Symbian^3 in time for Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, Spain 15-18 February.
Sadly there were unforeseen issues with making the New Graphics Architecture work on the BeagleBoard, which prevented this from happening.
As of late February 2010, what we do have working is:
- Symbian^2 running with a full UI and Qt on the Beagleboard (but S^2 is not fully EPL)
- Symbian^3 running in text mode
- Telephony stack working on the Symbian^3 emulator able to make and receive calls and texts
We hope to reach our goal within short.
Budget
We have a small budget to buy hardware for. Current estimates of the total project cost including BeagleBoard, the Beagle Buddy and the UMTS modem is about £550 , though we are talking with some manufacturers to get a "custom beagleboard extension" for the modem and reduce the cost to £300 or less.
There is also money for pizza so feel free to join!
Team
We have a very diverse team of enthusiastic individuals that usually get together after business hours:
| Duck | Nest | Activity |
Daniel Rubio (DR)  | Symbian | Project initiator, equipment purchase, HW development |
Andy Salter (AS)  | Accenture | Keyboard and mouse support on Beagle Board, screen layout, helping the rest of the team with all sorts of fixes |
| Tom Pritchard (TP) | Symbian | AT-LTSY from Nokia running on Beagle Board |
Arunabh Ankur (AA)  | Symbian | Project Manager , JTAG, OpenCD, tools management for Beagle Board, S^2 and S^3 Beagle Board ROMs |
Salvatore Rinaldo (SR)  | Symbian | Integration of Qt in S^2 and S^3 ROMs, customisation of Qt demos |
Sebastian Brannstrom (SB)  | Symbian | Integration of Qt in S^2 and S^3 ROMs, Wiki |
Arnaud Lenoir (AL)  | Symbian | Frenchman, RComm integration |
| Victor Palau (VP) | Symbian | The mascot |
| You | The Community | See the Todo list |
If you want to meet the Wild Ducks team, you can drop by our office in London. We typically work on the project on Tuesday evenings starting around 6 pm.
The Gritty Details
So now you know everything about the project. For details about exactly what we did, and how it was done, read on about the hardware and software.
- Hardware - everything you need to build your own phone
- Symbian - how we got Symbian^3 running on this hardware
Meetings
Here are the minutes from the wild ducks meetings. We are happy to share them with the community.
Documentation
We have created a dedicated page to host all the documentation related to the Wild Ducks project.
Media coverage
Contact
There are several ways to get in touch with the Wild Ducks team:
- The Wild Ducks thread in the forum
- The email list for technical discussions
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Contents |
Stichbury said…
Arunabha said…
Yes I agreee. So it all started with the concept of an “Open phone” for the community and by the community. We essentially are trying to make an “open phone” using Beagleboard and an off shelf modem (Symbian^3).We feel that adds to the propositions of the Platform Opening and sends the same message– “The future of mobile is open”.
The current efforts are to bring up a basic UI platform with QT which should enable basic telephony use case and demo some QT apps for a new look and feel. Though moving ahead we intent to support other use cases like MM playback ,graphics acceleration ,web browsing, camera etc .Still whatever we do would be replicable by anyone amongst the community helping students , garage developer or small entrepreneurs to prototype devices and demos.
--Arunabha 17:03, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
Arunabha said…
@ Stichbury - I hope it looks better now.Thanks to Sebastian.
--Arunabha 21:47, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
Hamishwillee said…
Shouldn't Andy Salter be in the list? Anyone else?
--Hamishwillee 04:09, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Stichbury said…
Thanks Arunabh, I like it. Thanks Sebastian, too!
--Stichbury 11:54, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
Elves said…
It's only a week to MWC, what's the progress?
--Elves 09:13, 10 February 2010 (UTC)
The background and mission section is a little confusing. It starts out by saying that Symbian should be used for purposes other than building a phone, yet then concludes by saying that it's setting out to build "our own phone". Which is it?
--Stichbury 13:03, 2 February 2010 (UTC)