iRex Iliad was not designed for Suspend/Hibernate

[scotty1024]

I think iRex has been about as clear with their priorities as a quick knife thrust to the kidney's.

Their focus is B2B. It's nurses filling forms, meter readers taking meter readings, news papers attempting to morph to the digital era...

They could improve power management but it's already good enough for B2B so why spend resources on something that is "good enough"?

They do have a microcontroller to wake up the iLiad: UCB1300. It's a Philips "kitchen drawer" chip that is used for a variety of features such as the Wacom, speaker and I suspect: the buttons.

So far I haven't seen iRex embrace the fact that they have a known set of hardware. Case in point? Speeding up the boot. I was told the reason the wireless.sh stop is in the startup sequence is because loading the hotplug causes it to wake up the WLAN card.

If I had been coding this? You can bet the hotplug would have been modded to not wake up the WLAN card. Oh well...

They've taken a bunch of off the shelf open source software and slapped it together to be "good enough". It's time for collaboration to begin so people can help polish off some of the rough edges and produce a more polished product.

[CommanderROR]

OK, so basically you are saying that the Iliad has everything that would be neede for the whole Suspend thing?
So why are they then saying "it can't be done" rather than "we don't want to do it, do you"?

[ElaHuguet]

I agree with Scotty, their B2B viewpoint is fulfilled even with a 10-hour runtime. Commander, you were talking about having to look up something while at work... why switch the iLiad off during your working hours? I think they might be thinking of the iLiad lasting 1/2 working days (not resting hours), and currently it works very well, for B2B; time to leave, switch off the PC, switch off the iLiad, put it in its cradle (or hub)... charged up for the next day.

Actually, even though I'm an "at-home" user, I'm happy with it right now, I'd appreciate a quicker boot-up time, say 20sec, if it can be managed, and of course, the longer the battery lasts, the better, but it's enough for me right now, with my usage.

[CommanderROR]

well...I'm not sure...maybe the battery won't last all that long with so many recharges...but never mind...it's not a paper replacement, and that's what was/is advertised...^^

[ElaHuguet]

That's my only worry, too... how many recharges does the battery have in it? 3 years? That would be enough for me, by then new e-ink devices will be the cat's pyjamas.

[scotty1024]

One key factor in this is iRex's command of English.

Suspend is the wrong term for what the iLiad is capable of. In Intel speak what the iLiad can achieve is "deep sleep".

An example from the iLiad, here's what their script says when it shuts down the WLAN:

root@ereader:~# . /usr/bin/wireless.sh stop
wlan0     deepsleep:setting to on

So if we quit calling it "suspend" and start asking them for "deep sleep" they may start understanding what we are talking about.

Since the set of hardware is well understood, after all, it's just what's in the case. The reliability of the "deep sleep" can be quite good. As pointed out previously, when it's a a mixed bag of accessories and 3rd party add on's it's a much larger challenge to make it work.

But the iLiad is a closed system with no factory options and very limited 3rd party accessories. Reliable deep sleep is possible. But it's like I've been saying, there is no CVS/SVN server to go grab deep sleep support out of for an iLiad. It needs to be custom crafted by someone with a good understanding of the Linux kernel and iRex has other B2B priorities right now.

GeekRaver left a Sony Portable Reader un-foraged at the local Border's so I was able to get my hands on a working one today. I just left it on at my desk for an hour with 1984 open on the screen. The battery meter didn't even twitch.

I'd like that for my iLiad.

I wanted Sony Portable Reader page flipping time, I got it. All I need is more source from iRex to get the other...

[ghostwheel]

There is no reason whatsoever that the iliad could not do what we, the users, would consider "hibernate".
All that has to be done is to store the current book/page that the user is reading, and get back to ipdf when the iliad wakes up. There is easily enough flash memory for that. Of course a more general hibernate would be useful, one that could wake up and restore any program - but for a device that has such a one-track use it isn't really needed.
The boot sequence should be made faster - but that, again, as scotty1024 pointed out should also be possible.

[kodomo]

Originally Posted by Henry Loenwind

You (and many others, I think) gut the wrong impression here. The iLiad CAN do all the modes you described. "Turn-off" is implemented. "Hibernate" is not, as the build in flash is to small, but nothing stops iRex or any third-party hacker from implementing it with a memory card. "Standby" is what the iLiad does between key presses, although it is not yet complete.

What the iLiad can not do is "Suspend to RAM", that is Standby + disabling the CPU, so the only components that would still consume power would be the RAM, the realtime clock, the memory controller and the keyboard controller. There simply are no memory or keyboard controllers (as I understand), so the CPU must do that work.

However, I'd guess the difference in power consumption between dedicated memory plus keyboard controllers and the CPU in 33Mhz mode is not very big.

Hi folks.

Hoping that anyone involved still reads this thread, I'd like to ask a question to that respect:
What about the power switch?
It doesn't seem like a physical power switch, but rather seems to generate an event (e.g. triggering iliad shutdown). If it is able to start a completely shut down device (without running CPU), what's stopping it from waking a suspended one up?
Does anyone know what this lever is controlled by, and whether it could serve that purpose?

Cheers.