Setting up Audrey (callerID/PictureFrame)
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On this page I hope to describe how I set up my Audrey to be how I
want her. If you follow the instructions on this page you do so at
your own risk. If you break or damage your Audrey by following the
instructions or even just looking at this page, it is your own fault!
I'm going to leave this as one long huge page since that's easiest to
reference and print out.
The 3com Audrey out of the box pretty much did everything I
wanted. I wanted a nice lightweight quick to boot thing that I could
quickly browse the web and check my email on. However as I goofed
around with it and read more online there was more I wanted to
do.
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Here is my final wishlist of things I want the Audrey to do:
Other stuff that is less critical is:
Getting it all Set Up
Got Ethernet? The instructions online were
very easy to follow and I had no trouble at all getting my $12 netgear
EA101 to work with the Audrey, this was great news!. I got my adapter
at ShenTech,
you can find the cheapest place to get them by visiting PriceWatch. Check which apaters
will work on the Audrey
FAQ.
Before I could do anything else I needed a
prompt and I couldn't get a prompt unless I had the latest updates. I
read all about it online but however hard I tried I could never get
the updates to happen by using someone else's marimba server. I
decided to flash the audrey using a compact flash card. I'd already
bought a 64Meg, but most of the stuff online talked about a 32Meg, so
I went and got one of those too (sadly it wasn't a sandisk, which is
also what everyone appears to be using). While there is a lot of
documentation outthere it certainly doesn't appear to be well
organized and the same operations don't work for everyone, it
certainly didn't work for me. No matter what size I put in for mkcf or
whether I used hex workshop or ntrw I couldn't get the damn thing to
flash the audrey with a new OS. then somehow it managed to work. I
noted the values I used (since these must be the magic values for that
compact flash) and was sure I could do it again, future attempts to
flash a different image didn't work at all. It's all such hocus pocus
it annoys me that I can't do it repeatedly. However now I am in a
state that I want to move forward from so I'm o.k.
My first successful flashing occured using InfinityUltimate
an all singing all dancing image which really shows you all the things
audrey can do. It was a good learning experience to look and see what
is missing and what I might want on my Audrey. However it's not so
easy to use as the original Audrey UI and I wanted it to be super
simple. I copied the whole filesystem over to my windows machine
(using fs-cifs to mount a windows share) so that when I had a simpler
image loaded, I could get any files/features that were missing.
I then uploaded Dill's
UpdateWithShellPlus which is exactly the base line that I want to
work with. I had lots of trouble getting it to flas too, but
eventually I got it to work by following the instructions to the
letter from the first post of this
thread (even though I knew the size of my CF card from ntrw and
hex workshop , I still did the "cat fs0p0 fs0p1 > /dev/cf" I think
that's what made it work.
I've been too scared to try it again...
If I ever understand it enough I'm going to write a merge of mkfs
and ntrw so you just give it an image and a drive and it will write it
the right size.
Here are links to my copy of programs you will need
I'm going to use ACID for my callerID stuff, it seems to work
perfectly.
I'm talking with Jim, about adding support for looking at phone
databases that are from the synched palm pilots and audrey's
addressbook.
I'd also really like the dialer option he mentions in his wishlist.
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I found three Picture frame apps neither of which is kind of what i
want, although I think I can get them to do what I want quite
easily. Since I'll be primarily dialupbased, I'm going to have to load
the images from a directory on the audrey (rather than a mounted
fs). I'd love to be able to use the storage on the flash, but noone
seems to have that working yet.
I want the picture frame to only come on from 6pm-9pm weekdays and
6am-10pm weekends, othertimes it can save the screen and leave it
blank. I may be able to get this to work by just modifying kcrontab
entries (forget that see Cron below).
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- PicSaver too large!
- RandomPic (from the infinity image)
I don't like this since with a small number of images it picks
the same one and the screen still flashes despite it already
having that image loaded.
- picframe by Marius, worked good, and was small, but I didn't
like the template way of loading images (based on file numbers)
and had no random mode.
I started with Marius' code and modified it such that you can use
templates, or you can specify a directory and it will loop through
that directory and pick images out of it. it can pick them randomly or
sequentially. Check out the Readme.
This Doesn't work yet...: Using the trick of renaming and
symlinking .wav files described here the app now
looks for a file with the same name as the current image except ending
in .wav and if it finds it, it will play it. Now when a picture of my
cat shows up, she meows!.
Here is where I plan to make a contribution to the audrey
community! I was frustrated that Audrey would call to check mail, but
not download it - when I see the flashing green light, I still have to
connect and then download the mail, it would be much better if Audrey
did this while it called and I could just turn it on and read.
I
posted on the linux-hacker
messageboard and found out that what I want is the default
behaviour! it appears that somewhere in the updates upto FINAL this
was fixed and my audrey works as expected and required! I'm so happy!
My plan was to modify FetchMail to download
the mail and my own FALLBACK_MDA that will put the files in
/data/email/in/ I even got so far as compiling fetchmail on QNX (I had to stub out
dn_skipname I'm not sure what effect that would have). But since I
don't need it anymore I'm not going to do anything else with it.
As I get programs compiled or find them I place them in my archive.
Forget about kcrontab for running applications at a particular
time, it only seems to run applications it knows about (even if you
goof with /config/KRONTAB_APPS (or whatever it's called)).
Cron allows you to run jobs/programs at specific times you request.
I got cron working on Audrey by using the cron from the qnx 6.0 rtp
image the key thing I needed to add was a root entry in /etc/passwd
and a usr/spool/cron/cron.allow
to make things easy on you guys I put it all in a tar you can just
untar in your root on audrey
cd /
tar xvf cron.tar
the tar is located at here.