Archive for July, 2009

Display brightness control

Monday, July 27th, 2009

I’ve added a display brightness control menu to dmenu on my Dingoo, which makes it possible to easily adjust the display backlight brightness. The brightness setting will be saved to disk and automatically loaded on boot.
Here is what I’ve done to accomplish this.

First I have created two shell scripts. One for saving the new brightness setting (brightness.save) and another for actually adjusting the brightness (brightness.set). Both files need to be in the local/sbin directory.

brightness.save (56 bytes)

brightness.set (138 bytes)

Then I have added a new submenu to my dmenu.cfg with menu entries for various brightness settings (10 %, 25 %, 33 %, 50 %, 66 %, 75 %, 100 %). I have used a light bulb image as the menu icon. It needs to be in the res directory inside the dmenu folder.

Menu Brightness
{
	Icon = "res/brightness.png"
	Name = "Display Brightness"

	MenuItem Brightness100
	{
		Icon = "res/brightness.png"
		Name = "100 %"
		Executable = "./brightness.save 100"
		WorkDir = "/usr/local/sbin"
	}

	MenuItem Brightness75
	{
		Icon = "res/brightness.png"
		Name = "75 %"
		Executable = "./brightness.save 75"
		WorkDir = "/usr/local/sbin"
	}

	MenuItem Brightness66
	{
		Icon = "res/brightness.png"
		Name = "66 %"
		Executable = "./brightness.save 66"
		WorkDir = "/usr/local/sbin"
	}

	MenuItem Brightness50
	{
		Icon = "res/brightness.png"
		Name = "50 %"
		Executable = "./brightness.save 50"
		WorkDir = "/usr/local/sbin"
	}

	MenuItem Brightness33
	{
		Icon = "res/brightness.png"
		Name = "33 %"
		Executable = "./brightness.save 33"
		WorkDir = "/usr/local/sbin"
	}

	MenuItem Brightness25
	{
		Icon = "res/brightness.png"
		Name = "25 %"
		Executable = "./brightness.save 25"
		WorkDir = "/usr/local/sbin"
	}

	MenuItem Brightness10
	{
		Icon = "res/brightness.png"
		Name = "10 %"
		Executable = "./brightness.save 10"
		WorkDir = "/usr/local/sbin"
	}
}

Finally, I’ve inserted an additional line into the local/sbin/main script to load the brightness setting on boot.

/usr/local/sbin/brightness.set

This line needs to be inserted before running dmenu.

That’s it.

UPDATE: As you can read in the comments below, there was a bug in the scripts, which caused the screen to turn all black when using it for the first time. I’ve modified and updated the brightness.set script such, that it sets the brightness only when there has been a value stored before.

New Dingux released – Gmu update required

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

A new Dingux version has been released, which comes with a new rootfs. An EXT3 partition on the SD card is no longer needed. Actually EXT3 support has been dropped from the Dingux kernel in favor of FAT to make installing Dingux from Windows easier and reduce the kernel size. Due to other changes dynamically linked programs need to be recompiled for this Dingux version.
Here is a new Gmu release which is compatible with the latest Dingux release.

gmu_dingoo

To run Gmu extract the zip file to your SD card and execute gmu.goo in the Gmu directory.

gmu-0.7.0_BETA4-DINGOO-newdingux.zip (0.8 MB)

Gmu 0.7.0_BETA4 for the GP2X Wiz released

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

Here is another Gmu release of the upcoming Gmu 0.7.0! This time it is a version for the GP2X Wiz. It also runs on the GP2X F100/F200 with the Open2X firmware installed. Beware that this is a very experimental release. Unfortunately I currently do not own a Wiz myself, so I was not able to test it on the Wiz.

gmu-0.7.0_BETA4-GP2X.zip (0.6 MB)

On the Wiz use gmu-wiz.gpu to run Gmu. On the GP2X use gmu-gp2x.gpu instead.

Gmu 0.7.0_BETA4 for Dingux released

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Here is another Gmu release for the Dingoo. Most notably it fixes an annoying bug where the backlight would not turn back on after a while when the hold mode had been enabled.

gmu-0.7.0_BETA4-DINGOO.zip (0.9 MB)

You need Dingux with a uclibc-based rootfs to run Gmu.

New Gmu beta release for the Dingoo (0.7.0 BETA3)

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Here is a new Gmu Beta release for the Dingoo A320. This release comes with some major improvements and bugfixes including:

  • Backlight power-off is now functional on the Dingoo (backlight will be turned off when the hold mode is enabled as well as after a configurable amount of time without pressing a button)
  • FLAC decoder now comes with meta data tag support
  • MP3 decoder does no longer crash Gmu with broken/invalid files

Gmu is highly configurable. It is always worth it to have a look at the README.txt file. Especially if you are having trouble running Gmu, make sure you have read the “Installation” section of the README.txt file.

gmu-0.7.0_BETA3-DINGOO.zip (1.0 MB)

I have added a script called gmu.goo to the archive, which makes it easier to run Gmu on Dingux. It does all the annoying stuff you had to do manually before. You can run that script from the command line or execute it from a file browser.

For those of you using dmenu on the Dingoo, you can easily add a Gmu menu entry to dmenu, by editing dmenu.cfg. Simply add a section like this to the appropriate section of the file:

MenuItem Gmu
{
    Icon = "res/explorer.png"
    Name = "Gmu Music Player"
    Executable = "/root/gmu-0.7.0_BETA3-DINGOO/gmu.goo"
    WorkDir = "/root/gmu-0.7.0_BETA3-DINGOO"
    Selector = no
}

In case you’ve extracted the Gmu zip file to some other location, you need to adjust the path accordingly.

Please make sure you are using the latest Dingux kernel. Otherwise the backlight power-off function won’t work.

Broken Dingoo SD slot

Friday, July 10th, 2009

The Dingoo is a really nice device, but unfortunately the MiniSD slot on my Dingoo got broken after a few days. As I did not want to send the Dingoo back and wait a month or so for a replacement, I decided to open it and check if it is repairable.

dingoo-sdslot_small

As you can see in the picture one of the pins in the SD slot has been bent badly. I was able to bend it back such that I could insert my MiniSD card and make it temporarily work again. There is no way of removing it without destroying the slot, though.
Two ideas how to solve that problem came to my mind. Either I could replace the whole slot if I find some place where I can buy a compatible slot that I could solder in as a replacement or I could try to solder a MiniSD-to-MicroSD adapter on top of the broken MiniSD slot. That way I would have a Dingoo with a MicroSD slot, which wouldn’t be too bad. If you know a place where to buy replacement slots or if you know if there are MiniSD-to-MicroSD adapters where one can remove the micro sd card without removing if from the MiniSD slot, please let me know. :)

Hello, world!

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Although this website is everything but new – it just turned 10 years old – there is something new: I’ve just switched from my old website system to WordPress. My old system wasn’t really bad, but I wanted to try something different after all. I’ve developed the old system many years ago and added only a few things over the time.
Now the time has come to try something new. A decision had to be made between writing a new system on my own and using an existing one. As you know already, I chose the second option.

I’ll try to update the website a little more frequently than before. I won’t promise anything though. ;)