Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

Interesting approach. I notice, though, that all three of the officially supported devices (the Keon, the Peak, and the Flame) are discontinued.

View on HN

Yeah, true, but the building blocks are available to port it to any cheap Android 4.x phone. I just don't have them available. I also chose this particular list because all of them ship rooted and have downloadable images available in case someone f*ks up, so I don't brick anyone's device :-)

An open source kernel also helps when you do GPIO support etc.

Would device donations be of any use to you?

I love the idea behind this project. It would be great to see "out of the box" support on some more accessible devices.

This is what I've been looking for. I didn't want to have to create something like this myself, but wanted to be able to reuse older smartphones lying around. I don't know if I want to use JS though.

I have been able to use the modified System application on my own firefoxos-based boards. However, for GPIO I have used a background process based on NodeJS (which exposes the ports using a REST-api). Getting GPIO working on some phoneboards would still prove a challenge as mostly they do not have these easily exposed.

No, not super easy, but not impossible either. http://ee.telenor.io/gonzo/hardware/2015/02/10/gpio.html

... of the GPIO on the SoC, you only have some of the exposed buttons a device might have. Far from ideal... also, at the moment FirefoxOS itself does not have a notion of GPIO as a WebAPI. But great to see this, nice article.

Correct, but they're exposed over file descriptors, and I added http://janos.io/api-reference/fs.html to talk to them :-).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com