Reusing portable media player with Rockbox
I’m a music lover all types indy rock, reggae, hiphop even k-pop; So hanging around with an broken ipod isn’t fun; I was tempted on getting a new media player but just looking that I have a few more media players around I decide to bring them back to live with Rockbox starting with Go-gear mp3 player that had a broken micro drive which I replace it with compact flash card increasing the storage space from 6Gb to 32Gb 
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I had a lot of trouble restoring the firmware even using Phillips recovering tools until I found good references at Rockbox wiki [1]; The next step is to actually replace vendor firmware with Rockbox, there are some driver issues that I can look as a side pet project but firstly I need a battery replacement and can find it in Mexico so I need to order one from a global battery vendor.
Gsoc midterm, where to go next?
Gsoc midterm evaluations pass last week, and there’s some good news about the status of my project, since the close relation between Openembedded and Poky I extend the support for Xilinx platforms to Poky which is faster than OE to build the rootfs for the reason that are far less recipes to parse and some others features. While Poky support for virtex5 platforms resolves my thesis problem to provide a graphical desktop, it also makes easier the software development for new users by using the Poky Anjuta plug-in although in can be used with OE.
Ponky on xilinx virtex5
Microblaze support still needs some work, but I’m close to complete it there’s no major changes
that I need to add to OE just resolve some issues with gcc and binutils related on shared libraries
linkage, there was reported a similar problem in OE mailing list, and going to start looking on that
direction.
And since Gsoc program is approaching to the end, I’m considering to start looking on labor
market, but first I need to complete my thesis and unfortunately this means a two month slip
, at the moment I’m having some hard to track issues on a hardware bridge from the system
bus to a simple peripheral and requires to learn how to use chip-scope (virtual logic analyzer)
to track the signals in order to validate its behavior. Thank fully there are some channels on
YouTube where I can learn in a simple and pain less way thanks to several Indian Technology
Institutes for having lectures online.
