Category Archives: Android

Android, Cool Stuff, iPhone, Projects

Rankz – an innovative middleware for sports event ranking information distribution

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In one of my last posts I wrote about a young company Rarebyte. The folks from Rarebyte are mainly focused in game development but they also have a great experience in building highly scalable middleware applications for sport timing respectively sport events.

They are named their product line Rankz.

Rankz is desigend for small to very large sports events with thousands of  athletes. Its purpose is to get detailed information about every aspect of a sport event in real time. It has already been successfully used at the

Rankz is also the central core layer in a student project called “IRONNET” (FH-Sportstiming) done by students from Network Engineering & Communication (NET) and is also the overall software basis used  by “FH Sportstiming” (NET).  An older version is also operated by Triangle Show & Sports Promotion Gmb.

The middleware uses spring core layer technologies which allows them to be highlight flexible. The data structures which specify the sport event can be entirely configured through XML. A full featured editor for XML/POJO  is also available. The interface to the timing database can also be configured through XML. For this reason you are neither limited by the used format of the timing data nor to the database engine. Rankz works out of the box with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSql.

Furthermore Rankz uses a dynamic plugin system. So new features can be added very easily. Plugins can be loaded and unloaded @ runtime.

Features

  • Superfast – detailed results nearly live during a race
  • Support for plugins (input, output, calculations)
  • Platform independent (completely written in Java)
  • Integrated webserver (Jetty)
  • Plugins:
    • Overall ranking
    • Ranking per split
    • Ranking in athlete’s age group
    • Relative ranking at certain splits
    • Timing, average Speed, finishing context,….
    • statistic system and missed time error correction system
    • FTP plugin upload
    • Athlete’s (geographical) real time position prediction.
    • SMS/MMS Notification Service
    • Athlete’s@Twitter …
    • Virtual Athlete’s rankings (audience favorite….)
    • Position estimation
    • RESTful resource connectors
    • Webservice Revision Layer
    • Distributed mode for sport events like wingsforlife
  • Query engine
  • RESTful interface
  • Web output for all plugins
  • CSV exports for all plugins
  • Android/iPhone  (iOS) applications for live data/timing visualization (special version for Event Moderator/sport commentators).
Android, Cool Stuff

Honeycomb for Tegra 2 based (POV, Vega,….) Tablets

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Why….. because we can 🙂 The guys from TeamNewCo and TeamVillain made the first running Honeycomb (VegaComb) port for the Tegra 250 based tablets.

The last evening I reflashed my POV with the VegaComb ROM,… and it works almost flawlessly. If you are interested you can download the stuff from the tabletrons forum.

Just in case you have any trouble installing the ROM.

I started from a fresh 1.09 firmware rev from myadventvega, then installed the recover apk mentioned here, rebooted and recovered from the zipped ROM. .. e volà.. 🙂

And remember if you like it consider to support them with a donation!! 🙂

12.07.2011 – Update….. the newest VegaComb seems to be version beta 1.7 link

have fun! 🙂

Android

Nvidia Tegra ADB driver installation

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Since a couple of people ask me about installing the ADB stuff, … here we go.. 🙂

So these is how i managed to get it working.

  1. Remove your POV drivers, these drivers are for rescue stuff.
  2. Install the Latest Android SDK
  3. Open the SDK Manager in “Admin” Mode and download and under “Available Packages” -> “Third party Add-ons” download the “Google USB Driver package.  After installation you will find the ADB driver under “..Android\android-sdk\extras\google\usb_driver”
  4. Goto “..Android\android-sdk\extras\google\usb_driver” and open android_winusb.inf.
    1. Search for [Google.NTx86] and [Google.NTamd64] add

;NVIDIA Tegra

%SingleAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_0955&PID_7000

%CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_0955&PID_7100&MI_01 (well spotted Michael 🙂 )

  • Open a shell an execute “echo 0x955>> %USERPROFILE%\.android\adb_usb.ini” (now without post space after hex, well spottet susafi!)
  • Connect your POV to your PC. Open the device manager. Here you should see something like “Nvidia Harmony with a yellow sign.
  • Right-click it and click ‘Update Driver Software..’. -> select to pick from a list device drivers on your computer
  • Browse to the google-usb_driver folder inside your Android SDK folder and select the android_winusb.inf file
  • Now you should see a new section “Android Phone” -> “Android Composite ADB Inteface”
  • Stop – Start you ADB server and check with “adb devices” for your POV. You should see something like

List of devices attached
0270308343a11617        device

One last note, if you have troubles deinstalling your POV driver, you can use “USBDeview”. Just search google for it.

have fun

Android, Cool Stuff

POV Mobii Tegra Tablet and how to pimp it

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A few days ago I got a shiny new Point of View Mobii Tegra 2 drive tablet.

The POV Mobii is equipped with :

  • Dual core Cortex A9 – 1 GHz
  • NVIDIA Tegra 250
  • Memory 512 MB DDR2 + 512 MB NAND
  • LCD display 10.1″ 1024×600 Capacitive touch screen
  • Operating system Android 2.2
  • WiFi 802.11 b/g
  • Graphics output HDMI
  • Audio ports Headphone out
  • Speakers 2x 1 W
  • Webcam 1.3M Pixel
  • USB Ports 1x USB 2.0 host

– So far so good.

But…, there is no android market installed, … for now 🙂 and the USB host mode is set to master.

So what can you do…..

After googling around and with the help of some hardware debugging I found out that the used hardware seems to more or less the reference design for the Tegra hardware which is also used in some other products.

One of this is Products is the Vega ADVENT Tablet. The OS used with this tablet supports USB host slave mode .

The first thing you have to do is to download the image for the Vega and flash you Mobii. (I’m using versoin 1.08).

After bootup you will have a MobiiVega-hybrid :-). You will also notice that the Vega OS is a bit faster then the POV version.

The next step is to upload a special ROM addon called the MoDaCo ROM addon. You can download it from here. If you have problems installing the addon on your 1.08 image you can also download the 1.06.05

Upload the addon is a bit more tricky. In the downloaded addon archive you will find an android debugging  bridge driver ADB . This driver must be installed for your MobiiVega-hybrid.

I used WIN7 for that process and encountered some problems where the tablet with activated USB debugging was not recognized by the OS.

If you also run into this problem you can fix it like doing the following:

Got to your device manager and open the USB-Controller section. There you will find a USB-Composite Device. Remove this device with its drivers and trigger a search for new hardware. Now you will get a new device ADB device for which you can install the ADB drivers.

After extracting the downloaded archive execute the install scripts and … here you go with android market, and a lot of other goodies 🙂

If you interested in some more details you may also have a look here. There are also some modified kernels around read here.

Ahhh and yes…. It goes without saying that any modification you do on your tablet and which eventually may fail are not in my responsibility :-).

have fun

Android

How to solve Android adb device not found errors

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To get your newly build Apps down to your device you have to use the ADB (Android Debug Bridge). The common way to  make your device ready for playing is to download the USB driver package which is included in the SDK Manager.

But these drivers are only for a couple of common mobile devices, so what if you have an ARCHOS 8 like me…. you still getting stuck with a nice…. device not found ….

The first part is easy, Archos in my case, offers his own usb drivers .

After downloading the USB driver I got a shiny “Archos 7 ADB” item under “Android Phone” in my windows device manager. But what the hell,…. after restarting the ADB daemon,…. “ADB devices” was only showing annoying … device not found….   mannnn.

Hmm, google is your best friend :-)…… The solution is that the ADB daemon needs also your USB device vendor ID (VID)

If you cannot get it from your device vendor you may look under device manager -> device details -> hardware ID -> USB\VID_xxxx.

The VID for the adb should be placed in a file under {user home}/.android/adb_usb.ini.

Insert the VID in HEX notation {0x0e79}

If this file does not exist, just create it!

have fun