FreeCalypso production calibration software

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hello FreeCalypso community,

As I wrote here previously, one of the requirements for manufacturing
and marketing newly made Calypso devices that are no worse than
Openmoko's (i.e., replacing historical short-supply Openmoko devices
with a newly made, unlimited availability product of our own) is that
we need to develop our own software for per-unit RF calibration on our
device production line.  We have not been able to find a surviving
copy of TI's original production calibration software that was used by
FIC (Openmoko's factory), so we have to develop our own replacement.
We can probably make our own calibration software even better than
Om's (running under Unix/Linux instead of Windows, and with full
source - Om only had binaries sans source from what I've been told),
but it is a non-trivial amount of work.  So far I have just started
laying the foundation for my envisioned automated calibration software
suitable for production line use.

My original plan was to make our RF calibration software part of our
FC host tools, and the development originally started in the
freecalypso-tools repository (rfcal subtree).  However, because this
calibration sw is so specialized (factory-oriented) and different from
user- and developer-oriented tools (my calibration sw absolutely
requires a R&S CMU200, a big, heavy and expensive RF test machine), I
decided that our production line software would be better off in its
own repository, maintained separately from FC host tools.

However, an unexpected complication arose, and because of this
unexpected complication I have to keep the new FC production tools
repository private (unpublished) for the time being.

The unexpected complication involves a certain Iranian company.  There
is a company in Iran who are building their own custom hardware that
includes a Calypso modem, and I know about it because they've been
seeking extensive hand-holding from me with the simplest of issues.  I
don't know what the purpose and function of their product is, but in
hardware terms it is a bastardized derivative of Openmoko's GTA02.
The Iranian board has a Calypso modem and a Samsung AP subsystem
similar to the GTA02, but there is no direct connection from the AP to
the Calypso modem - instead there is a hook-up for some proprietary
HSM inserted in between the two.

These Iranians have been seeking extensive hand-holding help from me
while telling me as little as possible about their project, thus my
ability to help them has been limited because I was never given the
complete picture.  They made most of their technical design decisions
without consulting with me, and when I finally saw the schematics for
their already-built board (apparently they built their board a couple
of months ahead of our FCDEV3B), I saw that their design is absolutely
full of *really* clueless blunders.  If they had only asked me before
they actually implemented all of those totally misinformed design
decisions...

Miraculously they got their board working despite their design
blunders - as just one example, they populated a flash+RAM chip with
only 512 KiB SRAM capacity (instead of Openmoko's 1 MiB) without ever
bothering to ask ahead of time if it was OK, but they got lucky in
that the XRAM usage of TI's TCS211 fw (the basis for both Openmoko's
fw and our own Magnetite version) just happens to fit within 512 KiB -
the same lucky happenstance that allowed us to port it to the C139.

In any case, these Iranians got some version of FC Citrine or
FC Magnetite or both running on the Calypso block on their board, and
then they quickly discovered that they don't have RF calibration.  In
fact, I don't even know if they figured out how to initialize their
FFS with fc-fsio - they have shown enough cluelessness that it's
possible that they couldn't figure out even that part on their own.
All I know is that once they realized that they are going to need RF
calibration, they emailed me asking me to hand-hold them through the
calibration procedures.

I told them that this calibration software is still under development
and not ready yet, but because we need it for our own production
processes (first the FCDEV3B, then our other planned hw products), it
is being actively worked on, and that if they would like to use our
production calibration solution for their own device production line,
I would be glad to give them our software and hand-hold them through
its use if in return they help my family with this:

https://www.gofundme.com/freecalypso-sister-fund

They replied with some lame excuse about not being able to afford this
much and so on, but I don't buy their excuses.  They are probably
thinking that they will get our calibration software for their device
production use for free because I am already developing it for our own
use and because my personal religion generally requires me to publish
all of my intellectual creations free to the world, but I am not happy
at all about that possibility, hence I decided to take a preemptive
measure in the form of not publishing this calibration software until
the Iranian situation is resolved one way or another, or until my
family member's breast reconstruction surgery has been paid for by
someone else, whichever happens first.  Because I do not believe in
copyrights or licenses, once a piece of code has been publicly posted,
it is free to world for anyone to use as they please, absolutely no
conditions or restrictions, hence the only way I can prevent the
Iranians from using our production line calibration work without
paying for it is to not publish it at all.

One thing I need to make very clear is that the calibration software
in question is useful *only* to those who are engaged in *physical
production* of Calypso-based hardware products.  If you are not making
your own Calypso hardware, i.e., if you are using Calypso phones and
modems made by someone other than you, then those Calypso devices have
already been calibrated by whichever factory made them, and that
includes our own FreeCalypso hardware products: I am not going to
start selling FCDEV3B boards commercially or producing them in volume
until I reach the point of being able to ship them fully calibrated
from the factory.  Calibration with the use of my software also
requires having a R&S CMU200, as it is the only RF test station for
which I am developing software support, thus if you get my calibration
software but don't have your own CMU200, you won't be able to do
anything with the sw besides adoring the beautiful source.

As things stand presently, the Iranian company is the only entity in
the world aside from us that is engaged in building new Calypso-based
hardware, and they are the only ones who may be able to make practical
use of the calibration software I am developing.  And as I see it,
these Iranians have been mooching off the community without giving
anything back.  The entire time I've been working with them they only
cared about their special application in their mystery product: most
of the problems and issues they have faced are issues of potential
interest to the entire community, potentially applicable to other hw
platforms and applications, but they never expressed any interest in
generic, upstreamable solutions, instead they only cared about their
product and application as if no one else in the world uses the Calypso
or anything else from Openmoko.

And it is not only our FreeCalypso community they've been mooching off
of, but Openmoko as well.  If they went to Samsung and asked them
"hey, can you please give us the hardware design files for your
Galaxy XYZ, we need to make a specially modified version of your
smartphone for the Iranian government", they would have been laughed at.
But Sean Moss-Pultz of Openmoko freely released the PCB design files
for the GTA02 motherboard (it was at my asking in early 2015, but
still), and these Iranians were able to take that GTA02 PCB design,
translate it into Altium with bazillion mistranslation errors because
they idiotically refuse to use PADS (can't be because of license
issues, as I pointed them to a readily downloadable and perfectly
working pirate copy back in 2015), and make their own bastardized
version of the GTA02 MB.

Then in order to actually produce their bastardized derivative of Om's
GTA02, they must have done the arduous work of tracking down and
procuring all of the obscure parts used on the GTA02 MB, the same
parts which the gta02-core people back in the day said were no longer
available.  So they solved the part sourcing problem which no one in
the Openmoko community was apparently able to solve, yet they are only
interested in producing their own bastardized derivative of the GTA02
(their product is so mutilated relative to the real FreeRunner that
the Iranian hw would be useless to the community even if we could get
a hold of it), and are not interested at all in helping the community
build new verbatim, non-bastardized clones of the real FR.

I laid all of the above out in the open in the hope that the
FreeCalypso community will understand why I feel it would be morally
wrong for these Iranians to continue mooching off of us when it comes
to the calibration software, and forgive me for keeping that sw
unpublished for the time being.

In any case, this FreeCalypso production calibration software *will*
be published free to the world in the not too distant future, one way
or another: I absolutely abhor the notion of proprietary sw of any
kind, for any reason, and I can grudgingly allow myself to pursue this
unpublished sw route only on a very temporary basis.  Considering the
most pessimistic scenario, if the Iranians don't pay up, no one else
makes a generous donation to restore my dear family member to full
womanhood and I have to pay for her breast reconstruction all on my
own after saving up the needed 10 kUSD over the next year or two, then
the RF calibration software will be released free to the world once we
get that breast surgery paid for all on our own, be it 1 y or 2 y from
now - I don't see how it could be longer than 2 y even in the most
pessimistic scenario.  And if someone would like to see it happen
sooner, or simply wishes to help out the human family behind
FreeCalypso, here is the crowdfunding page once again:

https://www.gofundme.com/freecalypso-sister-fund

Hasta la Victoria, Siempre,
Mychaela aka The Mother