Pandora Pandora Pim Alarm Deamon Rtc


chris_c

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Jun 25, 2010
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I can now cause a switched off Pandora to wake up on a specified time (wake on alarm) YaY! woot! etc etc

I had to make some trivial changes to the kernel for it to work - I've done this in a naive way and it will need some thought as to the best way to deal with it - but that can sit on the back burner for the time being... (at least the proof of concept works!)

What I'm interested to hear is what people would think would be best from an alarm daemon.

What I envision is that a simple daemon (possibly using sqlite) would hold a list of hardware dates and times that it needs to
run a script for. (different script for each alarm if needed)

Alternatively I could press cron into service, and on shut down set the hardware wake on alarm for the nearest alarm

The work flow I'm looking for is that the Pandora would wake itself up (and assuming here you don't auto login to X)
would as soon as possible start sounding an alarm before X comes up
(possibly customised for no alarm but if its in your pocket how you gonna know!)
the alarm would continue even while you login....
Once logged in a dialogue would let you shut it up! also the agenda application should appear showing the appointment you were being reminded of.

Which leads to a problem, I'd need to modify an existing agenda app to work with the Pandoras wake on alarm, either that or spin one up
with pygtk or something similar...

I don't really fancy some bloated framework like evolution, and ideally I'd like to have something small enough to fit on nand
(although for myself I always boot from SD - leaving nand for testing...)

So what do peeps think - its worth really thinking about now as I know its absolutely possible to switch the Pandora on with an alarm

For me personally having my agenda on my Pandora means we have an excuse never to be parted (yes I'm a sad geek!) kind of a killer app
 
I had a quick look at the ubuntu package on my desktop, my initial reactions...

it not really lightweight coming in at over 2mb installed
Its going to need hacking for the Pandora screen size - the calender but always seems to use a giant font....

But not a terrible app

Now don't laugh but I might look at a gpe agenda app....
 
OK the size might not be quite light-weight... but it's certainly not an Evolution behemoth... :p

Yes the generic config for layout would not be suitable for 800x480... But I have had it nicely displayed on an EeePC 701 (800x480)
It has a netbook mode that puts the tabs down the side.
Fonts obviously need reducing down to make better use of real estate.

Having said that... if you can get nice Organiser features like address book and birthdays... and appointments... I'll give you a cookie...
 
...is that one of those special cookies that make you relax...?

I think what I'm going to do is take Stuckies base debian, install a bunch of gpe stuff and my development kernel that enables the alarm,
then "all" I have to do is extract the next alarm details from gpe and set the hardware alarm on shutdown...

I should have a complete proof of concept, end to end prototype then.

If there is significant favourable feedback from that, I could then turn the shutdown script into a full blown executable with PIM plugins that can be called by the shut down script.

The idea being that a plugin would be provided for whatever PIM application the end user was using, this glib based plug in would interrogate the PIM db in use and provide the needed alarm values to the main executable.
 
only a few people seemed interested and I haven't had much time for various reasons, last I looked at it I need to solve two problems

1. repatching git kernel so pnd (squashfs back ports etc) work with my enabled alarm irq hack ( for some reason there is not a patched up kernel source it git...) OR wait till there is an "official" kernel with rtc alarm irq's enabled (heck there's even a hardware register you can check to see if someone might want the irq enabled.... ie its a very trivial hack!)

2. find a *nice* alarm deamon I can ask "when's the next alarm due to go off in system time" I really don't want to be calculating local time and recurring alarms - I'd rather just make one call to and existing library or be able to make a hack so I can grab the next due alarm when a particular agenda app quits.

If anyone reading this can help out with any of these two - while I'm busy with other stuff then its more likely to happen...
 
chris_c said:
1. repatching git kernel so pnd (squashfs back ports etc) work with my enabled alarm irq hack ( for some reason there is not a patched up kernel source it git...) OR wait till there is an "official" kernel with rtc alarm irq's enabled (heck there's even a hardware register you can check to see if someone might want the irq enabled.... ie its a very trivial hack!)
Share your patch on bugs.openpandora.org so notaz may have a look at it.
 
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chris_c said:
only a few people seemed interested...

I hereby officially and publicly offer you a declaration of interest!

And i am certain that once it works, there are suddenly a whole bunch of interested people that did not express themselves here :)

Carry on... ;)

Cheers!
 
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sebt3 said:
chris_c said:
1. repatching git kernel so pnd (squashfs back ports etc) work with my enabled alarm irq hack ( for some reason there is not a patched up kernel source it git...) OR wait till there is an "official" kernel with rtc alarm irq's enabled (heck there's even a hardware register you can check to see if someone might want the irq enabled.... ie its a very trivial hack!)
Share your patch on bugs.openpandora.org so notaz may have a look at it.
I don't have a patch, I didn't keep the original source - seriously its so minor that anyone with slight skills and 2 mins look at the rtc kernel code can implement very quickly and its possibly not fit for use as I just keep the irq enabled all the time and I'm not sure of what issues that might cause, it really need more work to make it a little more intelligent, there's several different ways to go either look for alarm enable or a procfs interface to enable it, either way its not finished, its a proof of concept quick hack. I only use the kernal myself when I'm messing with alarms and I haven’t had chance to do it for a while...
 
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don't suppose anyone is interested enough to meet me half way and hack orage to tell me when the next recurring or normal alarm is due in system time?

bit busy with other stuff at the moment...
 
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