WARP Xtra

Extract From Nir Simionovich’s blog Jan 25, 2009

click here to read the rest of Nir’s blog

As most of you are aware, the SMB phone system market is a crowded one so I am always on the lookout for technology/solution nuggets, either in whole or in part, that could help further differentiate a phone system based on WARP.  This week I stumbled across a very interesting survey that identified 50 open source companies (and their solutions) as the most disruptive and redefining for the IT channel.  The survey was put together by “The VAR Guy” and is freely available by simply registering on his site.  Of the 50 companies listed, 3 stood out to me as possible interesting additions to the WARP portfolio and possibly as additions to the phone solution you may be providing.  Keep in mind that I have not addressed the technical feasibility of porting any of these solutions to WARP, I simply find them interesting and open.  Continue Reading »

Asterisk GUI 2-1 – Status Update January 2009

A new version of the Asterisk GUI 2-1 for the WARP is now available.

Continue Reading »

Up until now I have had the opportunity to integrate a few Java applications with the PIKA warp.

The first Java Virtual Machine that I tried was JamVM where I simply created a simple Hello World application. This seem to do the job for now until I tried to use an existing application that used some Jars that were from SUN. This prompted me to try Sun’s J2SE Java distro for PowerPC (limited to 90 day trials). Then the application worked like a charm.

Then I tried a new application with the Sun’s JVM, but the application would crash due to insufficient RAM resources. So what do we do now? Well we need a way to reclaim some of the RAM used by the ramdisk. This can be done with PADS.

Developing JAVA application with the Warp

If you are branding your own application using the PIKA Warp, you may want to put your own LOGO on the LCD at startup.

Here are the steps to do so.

1) Compile and build the latest uBoot load from PADS.

<PADS dir>> make uboot

2) Take the pika.bmp file from <PADS Dir>/build_warp/u-boot-warp-xxx/tools/logos and use it as your file to put your new logo.

3) Use an icon editor (KIcon Edit) or an application that can edit pixels for a bmp file. It is important not to re-size the form factor (160 X 32). The file must be saved as monochrome bmp format.

4) Assuming that you have tftp running on the host, copy the file to where the tftp server is pointing to (/tftpboot).

5) Reboot the Warp and use the serial comm link to break into the uboot menu system.

6) Run the update bitmap command to burn the new bitmap.

> update bitmap bitmapfilename.bmp

7) Reboot and you should see your new image when starting up.

That’s all folks.

Have fun.

BTW: The following link is a freePBX image.

I just wanted to take a quick minute and give a status update on the FreePBX project for the PIKA WARP appliance. There are several things happening now and coming up so I wanted people to be aware of them.

The first thing to know is that the FreePBX project svn trunk has been branched. The trunk was based on the 1.2.0.67 version of PADS but will now be changed to support the upcoming 2.0 version of PADS. If you wish to continue using FreePBX against 1.2.0.67 version of PADS, you should use the new branch of FreePBX found here.

The new feature of the upcoming 2.0 PADS version that will affect FreePBX is the introduction of the BRI module. In order to use this module, version 2.0 of PADS must be used. This is the reason why FreePBX is being moved forward to using the 2.0 version. We will be implementing the BRI module as a trunk type within the freePBX GUI. The official release of FreePBX with BRI support is targeted to occur within one week of the 2.0 release of PADS from PIKA. This means it should be released in mid-February. In the meantime, the 1.2.0.67 branch of FreePBX should be used.

Keep an eye on this website for the announcement of the availability of the 2.0 version. In the meantime, keep entering issues in our forum about our FreePBX code base.

Have Fun

Shawn

Last week I got to thinking about how previous innovations in the phone system market might shed some light on what cool stuff we have to look forward to in the future.  Fortunately, I am surrounded at PIKA by individuals that have a long history in this area, some having experience going back 20years or more.  Needless to say, I didn’t have far to go for my history lesson.  For this exercise, I chose to look at 3 distinct parts of the overall phone system and then picked what I believe to be the most significant historical innovation for each.  Once I had picked my favorite historical innovations I did my best to predict what to expect from the future. Continue Reading »