Notion Ink

Camera and More

vikramdutt9 — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 05:55:55 +0000

Hello,

For a change, it’s not Rohan here. Work on Camera is still a WIP. Code for the camera libraries are closed source with NVidia and getting around the camera sub-system is taking longer than expected.

Having said that, if you are waiting for the camera update, voicing at Tegra Forum might help though most of the questions are either deleted or never replied. Here is one of the dev for Adam voicing for support, but even the last suggestion suggests to move on to OMAP

As the lead for the sw, it is extremely important for us to make sure that the roadmap doesn’t break anything on Adam 1. The only option (and better one) was to opt for RenderScript.

RenderScript is hardware independent (though can be tweaked) and development on RS will make sure that Adam 1 stays in SW support for at least 2 more years.

RenderScript and SVG are going to be in out focus for next two-year here at Notion Ink. Below is a very small sample of RenderScript rendering an A3D model of simple sphere, with Earth Map (from Nasa), bump map created using GIMP, couple of lights and animation (not obvious from an image).

Frankly sharing anything on development on next versions of Eden doesn’t make sense till the camera issue is resolved. That’s the last piece of puzzle, and if you can help sport your voice on that forum, possibly we can fix things faster.

As an ex developer of a leading brand you all know about, it is really fascinating to even absorb the idea of how community has made more than 200 ROM variants for Adam. Unlike Adam 1, there will be no short-cuts for 2. If something not working, it won’t go out. Our roadmap is built for next 4 years, so there will be speed differences. But one thing is clear and that’s what I bring here at NI, great products needs stronger fundamentals, and that’s what we will build first.

Last words on the next generation SW approach. We are approaching the era of micro-apps. Every app cannot be tuned in for a particular user. A doctor may have 15 years of formal education and 25 years of practice, but when it comes to sw, he can’t possible build one. But if see clearly, IDEs and APIs like Android SDK and iOS SDK have worked till now to ease the development of the programmers to attract more developers, making things sometimes as easy as making a “task flow” like an accountant would do, “refer” a value in one cell of a sheet to another cell. There is a truck load of information yet to come, but first things first.

Best

Back from Hibernation!

Rohan Shravan — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:58:46 +0000

Hello All,

We are back from hibernation now! Sorry for the break (much-needed on our end).

Let me know what is flowing across your minds and I will keep you busy reading on weekends!

Regards

Rohan Shravan

Notion Ink Adam Unboxing – The XDA Way

Rohan Shravan — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:40:04 +0000

Adam Beta (Tomorrow) Today!

Rohan Shravan — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:55:14 +0000

Update(18 Feb):

We have 2 links here:

LINK 1 : Update Recovery ZIPPED
LINK 2: Adam Beta ICS ZIPPED

This is how to use these files:

Download above 2 files.
Rename update_Recovery.zip to update.zip.
Copy update.zip and adam_BetaICS.zip to the external sdcard
Start the device in recovery mode (Volume Up Key + Power Down on Eden OS/AlphaICS, check for beast ROM)
Select “Apply External SDcard update.zip” (Use Volume Up down keys for navigation, second capacitive button for selection) You are installing recovery image right now.
Once Complete, reboot to recovery mode again (Volume Up Key + Power Down on Eden OS/AlphaICS, check for beast ROM)
Wipe the data and select the option – “install zip from SD card”
Select second option “choose zip from SD Card”
Select adam_BetaICS.zip. Install.
Wipe the data and cache
Reboot the device
Enjoy!

Regards

[17th Feb Post:

Hello there,

Tomorrow you will see release of Adam Beta. List of fixed things working excludes Camera, disabling notifications, compass, light sensor and Microphone.

3G, sleep issue, YouTube HD, graphics acceleration, better wi-fi, better sound and USB working now. Check this link for more. Jump in to report bugs and other issues.

More coming tomorrow.

Warm Regards ]

Rohan Shravan

Guest Post: ICS Team

Rohan Shravan — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 05:01:52 +0000

Hello Everyone,

For a change this time we have RaYmAn writing this post! Here we go…

Hi,

We have asked NI to allow us to make a guest post on Rohan’s blog in order to make some things clear about how our (The ICS Team) collaboration with Notion Ink works.

The ICS Team consists of the four people RaYmAn, Mrdeadlocked, Kushiel and MrGuy. We all consider TabletRoms our home, but we aren’t the “TR ICS Team”, we are the “ICS Team”. This is a minor distinction but important when considering our collaboration with Notion Ink. There is no official relationship between TR and NI, but we, the devs, do have direct collaboration with developers and other technical people from NI.

We started work on ICS for Adam shortly after the source was released. The initial efforts had some major issues which was shared across all Tegra2 devices as well as few other devices. It wasn’t easy to fix this stuff, but with help from Notion Ink we managed it.

Notion Ink has provided us with invaluable information regarding the hardware of Adam as well as spare parts and replacement Adam’s for those team members (rayman & kushiel) who sacrificed their Adam’s for the greater good (e.g. soldering in a serial port!).

They have also provided us with source code and details on the camera for Android 2.2, without which it would be pretty much impossible to get camera going on ICS. On that note, camera is progressing nicely, but it’s still not quite there yet

To answer some of the questions about how the collaboration works: We have been truthful when asked, and we intend to continue with that. Apart from donations (including several from Notion Ink), none of us are getting paid for our Adam work, and several of us are not interested in getting paid for it due to tax issues and similar(donations are welcome ). There are multiple reasons for not getting paid:

Notion Ink is an indian company and it can be hard to transfer funds to foreign nationals.
Tax issues in some of the countries make it complicated
Getting Paid implies being required to put down x amount of hours work per day/week/month.
We do this for fun, not for the money!
We would rather get hardware (e.g. Adam 2) than money.

On that note, it’s also important to consider that the other similar tablets are not getting ANY support at all from the vendors. This applies to Viewsonic Gtab, Advent Vega and others. The vendors couldn’t care less and they provide zero support! With Adam, we have contacts within NI which we rely on for information, source code and general support. Rest assured that a lot of the kernel would have halted without NI’s help.

All things considered, it could be argued that Notion Ink should put more resources towards putting ICS on Adam 1. Realisticly, this might not be possible. Notion Ink is a young company, with a finite amount of resources. They have no choice but to prioritize the resources in the best possible way. It’s understandable that people can’t buy tablets constantly, and continued support is of course important, but again, be realistic. Working on Adam 2 and other new products is the only reasonable business decision. There is no way a company can survive purely on
supporting old hardware.

To sum up: we don’t get paid, we do it for fun. We like hacking on hardware and software and we continue to support Notion Ink and the Adam because we believe in their goals and their desire to make an awesome product! Sure, it helps that they are giving us Adam 2s, so our hacking can continue on that device, but that’s not why we do it!

Thanks to Notion Ink for letting us make this post to clarify our (the ICS team) position in this whole matter.

ICS TEAM

Warm Regards

Rohan Shravan

New Post

Rohan Shravan — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:20:16 +0000

Hello All,

We’ve just added one more post to the development blog, do check it (LINK) out!

Regards

Rohan Shravan

Development Blog is up!

Rohan Shravan — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:12:05 +0000

Dear All,

The Adam II development blog is up and we already have 3 posts on it!

First one is just introduction, second one is on OMAP and third on one of the Infographics Project in progress here at Notion Ink.

The aim of the development blog is to take you deeper into the hardware, software and design, it also aims at providing material so we can learn a bit while reading them. First blog on OMAP covers some of its interface right now and if you follow it till the end, you should be close to making your own device/peripheral or write a driver!

The second blog will not change anything on this blog, which will keep its focus on the Firm, Adam 1 and any other issues you might have.

Also notice that all Adam I information, specially on ICS will be posted here on this main blog.

Head over to this LINK if you want to learn more.

With Warm Regards

Rohan Shravan

Notion Ink partners with Texas Instruments

Rohan Shravan — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:33:04 +0000

Press Release

Notion Ink partners with Texas Instruments

21 January 2012, Bangalore

Notion Ink has partnered with Texas Instruments (TI) Incorporated for its next generation Adam II Tablets. Adam II will be using OMAP44xx processor along with other TI components like Wi-Link 7.0 and Phoenix Audio Power Amplifiers. Adam II will also leverage the power optimizations achieved using mature combination of TI’s integrated power-management IC.

Designed specifically for best Power Performance and Multi-tasking Experience, Adam II will be based on Google’s IceCream Sandwich Operating System.

The OMAP44xx platform’s smart multicore architecture pairs its main CPUs with several differentiated features including programmable accelerators, hardware composition engines and a dedicated ISP. Imagination Technologies’ super-fast PowerVR SGX5xx GPU and enhanced memory architecture add still more functionality while an OMAP-specific distributed composition architecture enables advanced image and video layering for crisp, HD visuals. These elements and more are the force behind the OMAP44xx processor’s ability to enable fast and fluid multitasking while maintaining ultra-low power consumption.

Adam II will release the world’s first Modular Based Software Architecture which will further expand the scope of application development and use nearly every single hardware feature in a “user customizable” application. Drag and drop features will enable easy application modification and Open Source Module will further expand the use cases and tablet deployment. Node operations like in Blender, and “Application Authoring Tools” are primarily aimed at non-programmers for composing applications, games and use-case flows in a drag-and-drop fashion, utilizing visual editors and behavior-based logic system.

This System will help consumers, professionals and students become productive as they will be able to use the tablet as a logic analyzer, medical imaging device, signal acquisition and processing, 3D modeling and multi-media.

For more information about TI OMAP processors, visit www.ti.com and follow this blog for Adam II.

Rohan Shravan

Here is the Alpha!

Rohan Shravan — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:56:48 +0000

Hello,

Alpha ROM as expected is available for download. MrDead Locked played a lot on this new latest ROM, so lets start with a video first:

I am sure you will love this ROM.

Major fixes include:

Audio
Sensors (including Compass)
Bluetooth
Sleep bug partially fixed (you need to change the wi-fi policy for this)
- In case you have installed and device is not coming out of sleep, there is a re-set button near the MicroSD card. Press it to reset the device. Once it boots, turn on wifi, go to advanced settings, set “Keep Wi-Fi on during sleep” to “Never”. It’s a known bug (mentioned in the blog as well) and will be resolved in the next drop.
  You must keep the “Wi-Fi on during sleep” set to Never.
Hardware Acceleration
Accelerated Video
Wi-Fi
HDMI Video (no sound)
Capacitive Buttons
Back Buttons
SD Card Mount
GPS
120dpi launcher fix
0.39 Kernel

What’s left:

3G, though it’s working on kernel level now
Camera
USB plugged-in at boot
USB mass storage and MTP
USB Flash Drive
Light Sensor
Sleep Bug
Video Acceleration for High Quality YouTube Video
HDMI Sound

You can download the update from these links:

Please be sure to read THIS before you install.

Further, you can follow development and comments on LINK on TR. Special thanks to RaYmAn, MrDead Locked, MrGuy, kushiels, Ankit and Rohit.

Let’s discuss some stuff on Camera:

Camera implementation in ICS is very different from the older ones. There are new features and only stable platform is OMAP since they had a head start in getting ICS, add to it the lack of support from NVidia on any Harmony platform.
New added features in ICS are Face Detection (which is OMAP implementation), Zero Shutter Lag, Migration to Kernel 3.0, Sensor Polls the Accelerometer Input, Multiple Auto Focus Region Support, Multiple Metering Area Support, Face Unlock, Launching Camera from Locked Screen and new application of course.
All these changes on the User Space demands a lot of changes on the proprietary architecture of Tegra, which of course is proprietary.
This ultimately means that a lot of effort will be involved in fixing the camera, but we stay positive on fixing it asap.

There is a change in NInk’s strategy which was reflected in CES as well. You will seeing even lesser of NI in press. All meetings were private and confidential, and purely meant for business (in fact only business development team was at CES). Hence no public releases from CES, but there will be one coming next week, after which we will be sharing the developments on the next generation.

Post the mentioned public release, we will be starting another blog. It will focus only on development, and we will again see a new device coming to life. Unlike last time where the hardware was mostly done out-house, this time every resistor, IC, bus lane, etc is designed and selected on the very computer working on this blog. We will try to involve as many professionals as possible so the new blog can become a reference for new developments!

A very busy and productive year awaits us!

Warm Regards

Rohan Shravan

A Cross-platform Framework for NUI – Kivy

Rohan Shravan — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:21:17 +0000

Hello All,

Happy New Year All!

We have been rather quiet on what’s happening at our end on future products and developments, but today I want to share a rather unique project called Kivy. Remember the earlier reference to Python? Let’s see what it was.

Kivy is an Open Source Library Project for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps. It can use natively most inputs protocols and devices like WM_Touch, WM_Pen, Mac OS X Trackpad and Magic Mouse, Mtdev, Linux Kernel HID, TUIO. A multi-touch mouse simulator is included.

Check out this video of Kivy on Andoid.

Kivy is 100% free to use, under LGPL 3 licence. The toolkit is professionally developed, backed and used. You can use it in a product and sell your product.

The framework is stable and has a documented API, plus a programming guide to help for in the first step.

The graphics engine is built over OpenGL ES 2, using modern and fast way of doing graphics.

To understand more, just take a look at this (my personal favorite):

The toolkit is coming with more than 20 widgets designed to be extensible. Many parts are written in C using Cython, tested with regression tests.

Kivy is a community project, led by professional software developers. For more information on Kivy, you can get in touch with Mathie Virbel, Thomas Hansen and Christopher Denter here.

Why bother? Read this LINK.

Notion Ink is an active contributor for this project, and once you go through the gallery here, you’d see what Eden and Genesis would probably be able to do.

Download this app here to play around (it’s a presentation tool, and you might take a while to getting use to it as it is still in development. Hint: tap icons again to clear view…).

You can download Kivy from this link for your Macs, PC and Linux platforms as well.

Kivy is a powerful tool, and shares our philosophy of enriching user experience and promoting community collaboration. Notion Ink is proud to support Kivy and their latest venture to accelerate development, a Programming Contest.

This competition will help you learn more about the project, build some exciting apps (you can be a programmer of any domain) and help improve the project. Head over to this link for more information: http://kivy.org/#contest

This is going to be a very impressive year, specially because it will let me explain what are we doing, finally! Happy New Year Again!

Warm Regards

Rohan Shravan