29
Jun 16

CHIP

The $9 computer kickstarter project finally arrived.
2016-06-28 20.33.20Granted, it’s been beaten to the punch by the raspberry pi zero, but out of the box it has some nice touches…

2016-06-28 20.34.11

It’s wider than the zero but a bit shorter. Female headers, so that’s a bit more robust and easier for breadboarding and the pinout is printed on the header (you can see that more readily below). 2016-06-28 20.34.37

Nice insulating back cover so that you don’t need a protective box for it on the bench from day one (wouldn’t recommend deploying it without a box of course, but the pi zero really needs some protection even on the bench).
2016-06-28 20.34.57I do like that touch of the pinouts on the header.
Haven’t had time to fire it up and play yet, but first out-of-the-box impressions aren’t bad…


20
Oct 11

Unbricking the N9

Okay, so the N9 I’m trialling managed to spontaneously brick itself yesterday. No idea how – I wasn’t doing anything developer-ish with it, just treating it as a black box phone, and it happened while driving and the phone was locked and in my pocket at the time. It was working when I got in the car, and when I got to the range, all I had was the “Device is malfunctioning” screen. Resetting it (by pressing the power key for 8 seconds) did nothing. So I moved the SIM back to my n900 and started looking for ways to un-brick it.

Took a little while to figure it all out and find all the bits and pieces, but here’s how I did it:

  1. Download and install the maemo firmware flasher from here, at least version 3.12 (the older 3.5 version won’t work on the N9)
  2. Download the N9 firmware binary image using NaviFirm+. Here’s the (warning, 1.1 Gb!) file in case you don’t want to install NaviFirm+.
  3. sudo flasher -F DFL61_HARMATTAN_10.2011.34-1_PR_LEGACY_001-OEM1-958_ARM.bin -f -c

And done. All back up and working again. Simple once you have the bits and bobs.

Hope it helps someone…


18
Oct 11

Oh bother…

Spontaneously (and no, I wasn’t trying to flash the device), the N9 has developed a glitch…

Oh bother

I knew it was going too well…