You aren’t including things that you don’t need, so you don’t include their security issues, and faults.
You have room to include additional packages directly into the firmware that you consider necessary which are not included in the standard firmware.
The less software you include that you don’t need the faster the boot time.
Presumably a final product would use the mt7268 chip rather than the vocore2 module. In which case we might need to replace other parts in order to have it load properly.
The sd cards where shitty for many reasons. Only work with certain file types. Can’t remove files via WiFi. Really slow and are now obsolete and no longer made.
Great points, these are the main reasons I make minimal size docker containers lol.
Adding additional things I like because again, once its it’s in ya, no plugging it in again to reflash… although if that’s your intention I think I misunderstood, I thought you where trying to strip it down.
This statement confuses me a bit, could you please rephrase it / clarify. Because are we not discussing firmware? and I am not sure how software that’s not starting a daemon or being loaded in another way as part of the startup would have any impact? Not an expert in open wrt or MIPS though so might be missing some nuance.
I think the intended is to produce the modules ourselves as the designs are open afaik, see here;
Since QI can deliver 5W (or more these days) is power consumption a priority here.
It also depends what they prioritised I guess, like I believe the original proposed use case for the device was to run of USB OTG (could be misremembering) so they may have optimised it because a bunch of phones can’t output much current over OTG afaik.
Want to note that I’m mainly asking these questions and raising these points to flesh out the main priorities and requirements not necessarily cause I see no benifits. I did originally have a comment about devil’s advocate but @Devilclarke makes that super hard to say that with a straight face lol
Correct me if I’m wrong, but just because you can supply the power easily doesn’t mean there aren’t other reasons to reduce consumption, such as more power creating more heat… which I remember reading was a thing with the pegleg
A lot of additional service software is started automatically when it is installed. Additional drivers that are built in and not needed still check for their related hardware and so on. Firmware is a confusing title as it is a full Linux distribution complete with boot loader and so on. If you think Wireless router, you turn it on, and it is usually a few seconds before it is ready. This is basically that.
Based on my earlier testing I was able to get 7MB/s transfer speed with just FTP over WiFi and the micro SD card formatted to ext4. That dropped down to 1.3MB/s using SCP. The other downside of SCP is over 50% more CPU usage during a transfer than FTP. Which means it gets the VoCore kinda hot at the surface.
My own ideal use case is for archiving very important files like my keepass database and various documents I need to keep secure and available. It is unlikely you’ll be able to stream a movie off of the vocore unless it is in like 480p.
Was it Megabits per second or Megabytes per second? At 7mb/s you could copy a 700mB 720p movie onto another device in about 13 minutes. You’re right, no streaming though.
I figure the wifi set to WPA2 should provide a reasonable amount of security for short duration uses. And I doubt anyone will keep a Qi charger attached to themselves for days on end.
No you are right, I am simply trying to ascertain priorities and concerns which heat is a decent one. But in this case we should measure the heat and what impacts it then priorities it from there not preemptively try to remove a theoretical issue.
Ahh I see… Yes firmware seems like the wrong term then.
They call it firmware because it is written to some form of nonvolatile memory in the device, originally these were replacements for the router firmware (also a custom Linux install) on various routers (originally the Linksys WRT54g)
The vocore2 is based on a router chip, so using openwrt makes some sense.
Power requirements also determine the quality of coupling necessary with the Qi charger coil. Lower power requirements means less accurate or efficient coupling is necessary. This is critical to user experience trying to power the thing, just as implants with better coupling are easier to use because you don’t have to be exactly on the dead center of the sweet spot.
Definitely want this and happy to help.
I never worked with the Vocore, but, as others alresdy pointed out, boot (and power off) might be a delicate moment.
I’ll probably buy a board start testing.
