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jpcurcio
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| Posted: June 25 2007 at 19:18 | IP Logged
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woot.com has a Nokia 770 tablet for $129.99. It is essentially a web browser, but I thought anyone who wanted a cheap web-based controller for PowerHome might be interested...
-John
Edited by jpcurcio - June 25 2007 at 19:18
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jpcurcio
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| Posted: July 01 2007 at 02:38 | IP Logged
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A quick update...
I received my Nokia 770 today. After a bit of a struggle getting it to connect to my Wi-Fi (I hid my SSID and use WPA-PSK, which the Nokia supports, but for some reason I had issues), I was up and running.
If you're unfamiliar with the Nokia 770, it is essentially a hand-held web browser with built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networking. My main reason for buying this was to use it with the control center through the web interface... I figured it was a cheap way to buy a touch-screen controller. So far, it seems to work very well for doing that. Not sure what the battery life will be, but it seems to be able to do hours without needing a recharge.
If anyone else is interested, I think that buy.com is now selling them for about $130 as well.
-John
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guerrand
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| Posted: July 05 2007 at 12:20 | IP Logged
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Cool stuff. You should look over the psp section of the documentation. You should be able to put together a pretty slick interface for that device with that.
__________________
VuMe
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onhiatus
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| Posted: July 09 2007 at 16:52 | IP Logged
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All of a sudden I've been seeing these everywhere for about the same $.
A few questions:
- Does it support a kiosk / full screen browsing mode?
- Does it handle javascript?
- How is the performance?
- Any other comments?
I've been thinking of using a few of these for wall mounted controllers.
Please let us know how it goes!
Thanks, Tony
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TonyNo
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| Posted: July 09 2007 at 17:48 | IP Logged
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Over on www.cocoontech.com (which looks to be down right now), people seem to be using this to run RDP connecting to another machine that has a GUI (i.e. MainLobby) and is reported to work well.
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onhiatus
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| Posted: July 11 2007 at 17:47 | IP Logged
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I ordered one. I'm looking forward to playing around with it.
I'm not sure how I'm going to up the WAF.
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patrickm
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| Posted: July 12 2007 at 18:19 | IP Logged
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I think the WAF shouldn't be too bad... I ordered one as well.
I am hoping there is a easy way of getting permanent power into it from the back. I am intending to surface mount it on the wall and use it as a keypad. I'm hoping the web browser supports Ajax.
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onhiatus
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| Posted: July 16 2007 at 19:37 | IP Logged
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I got mine on Saturday - nice unit. I have not had much time to play around with it.
Ajax sort of works. The browser is Opera (8 I think) and my pages don't play very nicely. I'm guessing that it will be possible to get 100% functionality eventually. Not a huge issue as I'll have to completely redesign as I'm going from 640x480 on a roughly 6"x5" screen to 800x480 on a roughly 4"x2.5" screen - everything is way to small for touch control!
The screen is beautiful though. Wall mounting should be easy using the slip off cover that comes with the 770. You'll need to add some kind of wire cover on the bottom to hide the standard barel plug that powers it. Nice thing about this set up would be that you can have it look nice installed on the wall - yet it will still easily slip out to use comfortably from the couch.
Also you'll need to do some tweaks to keep the screen from going to sleep (longest built in delay is 1hour) - see this article.
This device is running Linux (Debian) so should be infinitely hackable.
I've had minimal time to play with it, but so far it looks very promising. Worst case is I'll install PlayerPal and use it as a full function two way remote for wmp...
I look forward to seeing what others do with it.
-Tony (OnHiatus)
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patrickm
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| Posted: July 17 2007 at 02:05 | IP Logged
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Ajax sorta working is encouraging. I'm hoping to use a few of these 770s for the primary interface devices for my system. I hope there's enough browser performance to have a decent responding UI with nice sliders and such.
My unit shipped today, I can't wait to start messing it.
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jpcurcio
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| Posted: July 21 2007 at 14:34 | IP Logged
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Also try hitting maemo.org for support... there are a bunch of hacks for the 770 that allow you to access and modify the OS. I've also heard of people getting vncviewer running on the 770...
I haven't had a chance to digest much of this information, due to being overloaded at work (which will continue for the next two weeks, at a minimum  ). It would be great to read of some other people's successes and/or failures using this device...
-John
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jpcurcio
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| Posted: July 21 2007 at 14:37 | IP Logged
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Also...
The reason that the 770 is available relatively cheaply now is that Nokia has released the 800. The biggest problem with the 770 (from what I've read) is that the processor is underpowered (i.e., slow), and the memory is limited. They seem to have addressed this in the 800, but given the relatively light duty I have planned for it, the 770 should do fine.
Also, regarding my previous post... I think I saw somewhere that there is a hack that allows the 770 to access the memory card memory (by default, it only uses this for storing files, etc.); a 2 GB card is available from newegg.com for about $40, which might make the device more usable.
-John
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onhiatus
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| Posted: July 21 2007 at 15:51 | IP Logged
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So I am having no issues with my ajax stuff - it works great! The 770 is slow to run apps, but my intention is to leave it in full screen browser mode and it seems pretty snappy for that.
You can have the 770 boot off the memory card which is supposed to massively speed things up. I've ordered a card...
This is a very cool device for home automation. Now I just need to redesign my entire interface for the smaller sscreen.
-Tony (onHiatus)
ps. I'm using the 770 to write this and browse the forum. Looks great - as does gmail, google, etc.
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patrickm
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| Posted: July 21 2007 at 17:54 | IP Logged
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I received mine on Thursday. I've made a drawing for a wall mount that will have a USB and power connector hard mounted in the mount. I'm also putting in ambient light, temp, and humidity sensors wired to a small ARM processor with USB. I'm thinking of using the ARM USB port to wake up the 770 from either a trigger from the main PH box or by a local IR proximity sensor. I'm planning to run CAT5 back to the server closet and run power and RS485 to the wall mounts over the 4 pairs.
My software plan is to see if I can set up the 770 to be strictly a dedicated full screen web browser without any other apps. I hope that is possible without too much grief. I think I have seen other non opera browsers running totally full screen on the 770 somewhere.
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onhiatus
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| Posted: July 22 2007 at 20:03 | IP Logged
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Interesting, so you're going to process the temperature locally? I'll be interested to hear how the wakeup via usb goes.
I used the above link to set my timeout to infinite (0 seconds) while plugged in. The screen still goes off, but touching the screen instantly brings it back - I think good enough for me.
I tried the minimo browser (same code base as firefox), but was disapointed. It will run full screen though.
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patrickm
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| Posted: July 24 2007 at 01:01 | IP Logged
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I am planning on transmitting the light level, humidity, and temp back to the main PH box, but the ADC is local to the wall cradle.
I am waiting for my USB and power connectors to arrive, so I haven't had a chance to lash up the ARM to the 770 yet, but I did notice the display wakes up with a change of state of the USB cable i.e. unplug or plug the cable. There is a brief text box that appears stating the USB is unplugged or plugged but that's it. I would like it better if the text box didn't appear but that's not bad and that would be very easy to do with the ARM.
What are you using for your page development with AJAX? I am contemplating using dev studio, but am looking around for other ideas.
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onhiatus
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| Posted: July 24 2007 at 14:35 | IP Logged
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Interesting - more ambitious than what I'm doing. I do the data collection separate from the display. If I were starting over I'd probably go something closer to what you are doing.
I'm having some stability issues. When I leave the device running opera with my control page it seems to reboot after a couple hours. Which means I loose my internet connection and the control page. I'm not running with the most current image - I'm just using the OS that came loaded. So perhaps that will help. I'm also intending to boot off the memory card.
I haven't had a lot of time to experiment, but today I left minimo running my control screens - I'll be curious to see if that runs more stable. I don't like minimo as much - I've not figured out a way to get rid of all the displayed controls (i.e kiosk mode), and the screen flashes everytime I load new data (like fire fox).
Worst case is that I'll get my page to automatically be loaded in opera on start up - that should make it mostly usable. Maybe slowing down the data refresh rate (~3 seconds right now) would also make it stay up longer.
My Ajax is roll your own - there's a discription of what I've done and how in another post, here
Keep us informed
-Tony (OnHiatus)
Edited by onhiatus - July 24 2007 at 14:36
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onhiatus
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| Posted: August 10 2007 at 17:35 | IP Logged
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A caveate on using Front Page or dev studio - both these make heavy use of object styles in a very IE centric way. What looks great on IE does not always look the same on Opera. If you go this route plan on having to do a lot of manual tweaking.
How goes the 770 integration? I haven't gotten anywhere yet - to much to do in the summer. I'll probably have to wait until this winter to redesign all my pages to work properly with the 770 - still excited about it though!
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patrickm
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| Posted: August 12 2007 at 17:28 | IP Logged
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I think I'm on the cliff side of the learning curve with the 770's browser. I have been messing around with the slider java code TonyNo posted a while back. The sliders work in IE6 and Firefox on the desktop, but there's no joy with Opera on the 770. The sliders render fine but don't respond. In WM3 on my PDA they don't respond or render properly.
I am wondering if Dreamweaver or some other development tool would make this process less painful?
The NetRemote screen shots look great and I wish there was a way of running that on the 770 but I doubt that will ever get ported to Linux.
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TonyNo
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| Posted: August 12 2007 at 17:43 | IP Logged
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Quote:
| The NetRemote screen shots look great and I wish there was a way of running that on the 770 but I doubt that will ever get ported to Linux. |
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A round-about way to do this is running Remote Desktop. I have seen RD for the 770 somewhere.
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patrickm
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| Posted: August 12 2007 at 20:09 | IP Logged
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Thanks TonyNo, rdesktop is pretty slick.
I thought this would be an easy solution till I remembered that I will have multiple 770s throughout the house. I am going to try an experiment running vmware with multiple xp virtual machines running netremote. If that is tolerable, this might be the solution, be it a very messy and complicated one.
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Topic: Nokia 770 $129.99 on woot
