Resized dialog components

I’ve done some improvements in the GUI. Now the size of the controls and fonts depends on the DPI provided by the VM. I still need to change some background colors and margins. Next tasks should be:

- Update Openmoko and Jalimo versions on the FreeRunner (hopefully we’ll be able to access the GPS device without reading ‘/dev/ttySAC1′),
- Test GPX/CSV creation,
- Add GML driver,
- Add the first version of the editing tool,
- Improve OSM and Yahoo maps drivers so that we don’t need to resample the tiles (so these drivers will impose a discrete zoom policy),

 

Here are some screenshots:

283 dots per inch need new GUI

According to the cacao VM, the FreeRunner has 283 dots per inch (not a multiple of 72, not a multple of 96, not a power of 2… it’s a prime number!). Anyway, the fact is that 283 is far too much to keep the GUI as it is in the published version of the application, so I am currently working to redesign gvSIG Mobile’s dialogs. And thank you Joseph for that dalinian keyboard ;)

GPS walk on a shapefile

I did not store the GPX track. I’ll do it next time:

Accessing the GPS device

The librxtxSerial.so library is available from this website for 7 different versions of the ARM architecture, but I was not able to get it to work on Jalimo:

http://rxtx.qbang.org/ToyBox/2.1-7-build1/Linux/glibc-2.3.5/

Since on the Linux platform serial ports are also readable as files and gvSIG Mobile allows GPS simulations with text files containing NMEA code, it is possible to read the NMEA flow by opening the ‘virtual file’ /dev/ttySAC1. It’s not the best way to do it, because it prevents other applications from accessing the GPS device, but it works.

After connecting and accessing the GPS device, it finally gets a fix after a few minutes, and we can see the coordinates on gvSIG Mobile’s status bar:

This a shapefile showing the buildings in the center of Valencia:

Then we change the shapefile’s symbology (because the GPS cursor is also blue) and ask gvSIG Mobile to place the cursor on the map, and here it is :) The cursor and status bar are not fully painted in this screenshot because I still have problems to take screenshots properly, but I promise you they looked great:

Georreferenced image files

gvSIG Mobile can also open Java-friendly image formats, and treat them as a georreferenced raster if they come with a so-called world file. The problem with these images is that they take up a lot of memory and make the application more fragile. Here is a JPG image (valencia_center.jpg) of the quarter of Valencia where I live:

and this is the 6-parameter world file valencia_center.wld:

0.0000126530885609
0
0
-0.0000126530885609
-0.37673040613560527
39.475902916865880738

And here is the Openmoko screenshot:

GPS, ttySAC1

All the GPS settings dialogs seem to work fine. We only need to find out the right way to access the ttySAC1 port, trying to keep as much shared code as possible. Considering that the NMEA data can be easily redirected to the console, I guess it’s not going to be very difficult. gvSIG Mobile’s GPS capabilities have been developed by Juan Guillermo Jordán from the Universitat de Valencia - Institut de Robotica. I’ll ask him about this.

Here is a little GPS application written in C++ for Openmoko:

http://svn.projects.openmoko.org/svnroot/openmoko-agpsui/

And these are its most interesting lines of code:

[...]

#define pipeName        “/dev/ttySAC1″

[...]

// — gets a file handler
GL_DATA.fd = open(pipeName, O_RDWR);

[...]

// — turn on/off the GPS device

static void gllin_poweron(int on) {
  int fd;
  char cmd;

  fd = open(”/sys/bus/platform/drivers/neo1973-pm-gps/neo1973-pm-gps.0/pwron”, O_WRONLY);
  if (!fd) return;

  cmd = (on) ? ‘1′ : ‘0′;
  write(fd, &cmd, 1);
  close(fd);

[...]

 

A new on-screen keyboard

As Joseph suggested, I have installed these packages, which provide a much better on-screen keyboard:

http://www.ginguppin.de/node/15

I also had to update a package called libfreetype6, which can be downloaded from here (first item is the right platform):

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/repo/?action=details&pnm=libfreetype6

And here is the new keyboard:

The GPS device

The NMEA code can be seen directly in a command terminal, as the Openmoko wiki says:

echo 1 >/sys/devices/platform/s3c2440-i2c/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/0-0073/neo1973-pm-gps.0/pwron
cat /dev/ttySAC1

These are the coordinates provided by the FreeRunner for Plaza Tetuán, in the quarter of Valencia where I live:

And this is the where Google Maps places them (I was actually sitting where the red arrow indicates):

The slash character “/”

If you open a command terminal on Openmoko and drag the stylus over the screen, the text gets selected, as usual. Since we are on a Linux system, it also gets copied to the clipboard. So if you have a text file that contains a special character like “/” or “>”, you can show its content with the less command, for instance, then select the characters of your interest, then use the paste button (the last button in the button bar) to paste those characters while you are typing a command that needs them - just until the on-screen keyboard includes them ;)

Remote raster services

This is a little Open Street Map driver we’ve been testing on gvSIG Mobile. It downloads and resamples the needed OSM tiles. I still have not connected the device to the internet, so I had to add some cached tiles to make it work, but once it is connected, it should work without changing the source code. This is the square where Prodevelop is located, in the heart of Valencia (Spain):

I tried to do the same with the WMS layer but it didn’t work, I still don’t know why. I’ll take the device home to test my Wifi network, cause we don’t have one in the office.