Bluetooth dongle for the ZipitZ2
#zipit irc channel user Uhrheberhas made a Bluetooth dongle for the ZipitZ2. He has only built the hardware so far but the software is on the way. You can find the instructions for making the dongle on his blog uhrheber.wordpress.com
Zipitbot
#zipit IRC channel user nulluser has turned a ZipitZ2 into a nice self contained bot. The Zipit talks to a dsPIC controller board via i2c (originally via the serial mod) and the whole thing is controlled via wifi using a client program on a PC. The bot is a very cool use of the ZipitZ2. He has kindly posted alot of information about it including the client software sourcecode on his zipitbot webpage
[Update: I sent Hack-a-Day a tip about the zipitbot last night and they've posted it http://hackaday.com/2011/01/20/zipitbot/ ]
The state of the Zipit
Things in the Zipit world have been quite interesting in the last year. Not only do we now have a very nice u-boot bootloader and installation script courtesy of marex, mozzwald and geordy. We also have working USB host on u-booted Zipits courtesy of GPSFan, mozzwald and myself (although I only had a small part in it's creation and perfection) as well as two nice serial mods from Foxx and geordy. I've been slaving away on my forks of IZ2S, IZ2Se and EZ2S as well as writing a few utilities and scripts for the Zipit in general and porting a few interpreters and compilers to ARM and the Zipit (OpenCOBOL, 4tH, lua, bwbasic, blassic...). mozzwald, wicknix and wejp has made some nice rootfs for the Zipit. mozzwald and wicknix's are based on ubuntu and debian respectivly and have versions for both u-boot+mainline and blob+.29 bootloader+kernel. wixknix's z2sid comes in two flavours, console only and X and mozzwald's z2buntu is X only. wejp's is for u-booted zipits only and is based on a buildroot rootfs and is console only. A couple of  nice things about wejp's rootfs is that it is really small and it comes with a really nice audio player based on SDL called Gmu. On the hardware side of things, Dom a French Zipit Owner and user has made a nice cable for charging/powering your Zipit from a USB slot on your computer or via an external battery pack. He is selling the cables and it costs 7 euros (about $10 incl postage) to have one sent to the USA. Dom is also working on other nice hardware additions to the zipit like screen protectors and a USB hub that can also charge/power the zipit too. Another #zipit channel user zashi has written a nice key binding utility for .29 kernel upgraded and u-booted zipits called ebindkeys which I am trying to get working in IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S, so far i've not had much luck but i'll keep trying, I suspect I need to do some more fiddiling with kernel modules and /dev nodes
[Update: ebindkeys does work in IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S. As i suspected it required loading a module and creating nodes and some fiddiling, we can't use it for the green power button but it does give us access to all the "normal" keys plus home, options etc. ]
Well that's all that I can currently remember about what's going on in the Zipit world, i'm sure i've forgotten a few things but i'll post about them in the fullness of time.
Happy New Year Zipitians
New tutorial for upgrading the kernel and running debian on a ZipitZ2
designate72 from the #zipit irc channel has written a new tutorial on how to upgrade the kernel on a ZipitZ2. It is more up to date than the other tutorials for this on the web so I recommend that it is the one to follow at the moment. There is an easier way using wicknix's (from the #zipit irc channel) z2sid but the tutorial is good anyway.
Personal Solder Slave
When I was younger I had reasonable soldering skills but 25+ years of letting them slowly rot and a combination of ill health and old age have given me the shakes and terrible eyesight. I can still cope with larger items like resistors on perf board and the removal of the power socket on the Zipit Z2's mainboard but for anything more fiddily i've got no hope. Luckily Foxx from the #zipit irc channel not only lives quite near me but is also a soldering master and i've turned him into my personal solder slave. I tell him how great he is and he does my soldering tasks for me 
. He's especially very good at doing the serial mod on the Zipit Z2 and making USB connectors for the rear expansion port of the Zipit Z2. He's told me that he's willing to do the serial mod, usb connectors or any other soldering tasks for people for the cost of parts, postage (or travel if you are in the NYC area and want him to do it in person) and a reasonable fee (depends on the difficulty of the soldering task). You can either contact me or look for Foxx in the #zipit irc channel.
Ghetto eprom erasing
[Note: As we all know cameras and I don't exactly work well together but i've tried to at least get semi-focused shots.]
I have been messing around recently with Psion Organiser2's. I'd wanted one when i was younger and they first came out but I had better things to spend my money on at the time (Girls, Beer and travel). Anyway I recently picked up a couple along with a couple of programpaks, rampaks and some datapaks. The rampaks are just battery backed up SRAM and the you can read/write to them willynilly as much as you like as long as the battery is still functional. Programpaks are normally PROM (or ROM) so you don't really need to worry about writing to them as you can't but the datapaks are EPROMs, so like the rampaks you can read/write to them however there are certain caviats. reading is fine, you can read from them until the cows come home and a couple of months beyond and writing is ok too, it'll drain the battery in the Organiser a  bit but no real problems, where there is a difficulty is that when you delete a file on a datapak it isn't really deleted it's just unlinked, the space isn't freed it's just not available so eventually you will have a datapak that you can no longer write too. When Psion were making and selling the Organiser they also made and sold a datapak eraser that was really just an eprom eraser in a psion labelled box and a 20 minute timer. I don't have one of those and I haven't seen one that runs on American voltages anyway and I no longer have a bog standard eprom eraser either so I needed to either build one or buy one. The thought of buying one does go against the grain for something so simple and the ones on evilbay looked like they either sucked, were unsafe or the drawer for the eproms would be too shallow. So I set about looking for instructions on building one. I found a link to some instructions to building one that looked quite nice http://highfields-arc.6te.net/constructors/other/epromerase.htm but I haven't seen a flashlight like the maplin one in the states for years and i wandered around a few pet stores and medical supply stores in the area and noone had the right tube anyway (i do plan on trying to find the parts to make the one in the link as it looks nicer than my "hack" but for the time being i'll use what I eventually ended up with.
Emulation (and Gaming) on the cheap
Over at hunterdavis.com Hunter has written a great post on using the dockstar as a gaming and emulation system. The dockstar is something I keep mulling on getting a few as they can be had for as little as $25 but i've not had the spare cash recently because what little disposable income i've had recently has been used to get psion organiser 2 and tandy model 10X stuff. I'm now definatly going to be saving my pennies for some dockstars (unless someone wants to send me a brace or two) though as i have a lot of emulators i use on a regular basis and i play wesnoth fairly regularly too. Even if you aren't that interested in Gaming and Emulation it's still a good article on the dockstar. the relevant post is here
USB charging cable for the ZipitZ2
I've made a usb charging cable but my efforts were terrible. a mass of electrical tape holding together a spliced plug off a broken power supply and a usb cable. It does work reasonably well though but recently a comment in my post about clocks for the zipit led me to a blog by a french zipit owner who has made a much nicer cable. my french is terrible, it's been over 30 years since I took french at school but from what I can workout he's selling them for 3 euros. I am tempted to send him a few euros and getting a couple myself.
Mounting a raw disk image
[ Twentynineth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 09/08/10]
I have recently started moving my ZipitZ2 development from a combination of aboriginal linux, buildroot and scratchbox1 to a combination of aboriginal linux, buildroot and scratchbox2 which means I need a way to seed the development rootfs with a working rootfs. Now I could manually move files from a ZipitZ2 to the scratchbox2 rootfs but that is error prone as I might miss a file or two or I might mess up permissions and setting up device nodes etc. is a right PITA. The easiest thing to do is to use someone else's rootfs however they are normally distributed as a disk image with one or more partitions in the image which makes mounting them normally almost impossible a bit problematic especially with large disk images (this is not completely true any more if you are using a modern distro with the latest versions things like util-linux). However there is a nice linux program available (available in every linux distribution there is as it's an important command) called losetup that will let us use a disk image as if it is a disk.
We'll use mozzwald's ubuntu rootfs image as an example of how to mount a partition within a disk image. After downloading and untar'ing his rootfs image you need to mount the image as a disk using losetup
sudo losetup /dev/loop0 zubuntu-jaunty-basic-rc1_05172010.img
Once you have done that you can then treat the device /dev/loop0 as if it was a real disk, all the utilities and programs that manipulate disks in linux will work as expected. So what we now need to do is workout where the first partition (or any other partition we are insterested in) is located within the disk image. To do that we use fdisk.
sudo fdisk -lu /dev/loop0
we use the u option as we want to get the fdisk to talk in sectors and not cylinders.
To calculate the offset multiply the units (512) by the partition's start (243), which in this case gives us 124416. Detach the disk image from the loop device.
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0
and then reattach the disk image to the loop device using the calculated offset.
sudo losetup -o 124416 /dev/loop0 zubuntu-jaunty-basic-rc1_05172010.img
and then mount the loop device as normal.
sudo mount /dev/loop0 /media/rootfs
and you are done and can copy the files from the disk image to wherever you want.
[update: there are other less convoluted ways to mount raw disk images if you have a recent version of util-linux on your system. after finding out the offset just use the offset option in mount. Geordy also let me know that volume 27:2 (Summer 2010) of 2600 magazine (towards the back of the issue) there is more clever usage of the loop back file system with regard to mounting an ISO as writable and tweaking some settings with it. ]
ZipitZ2 JTAG
[ Twentyeighth in a series recreating the lost posts -- This was originally posted 21/08/10]
Sweetlilmre has posted a nice writeup on how to perform the JTAG mod on a ZipitZ2. There is also an old writeup about the JTAG mod available here