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Screen name: Arturo Fernandez-Sanchez (karthur)
Title/Functional role: I.T. Manager
Project title: Wind-ups GP32
Time to complete : 4 years

Project details: Four years ago, ebook reading devices like Kindle didn’t exist and the only thing you had to read electronic texts and documents were the PDA’s; but they had two problems: they where expensive and the batteries didn’t last much time. In this time I had a Korean game handheld called GP32, that was designed to be easily programmable, with a SDK released by the company that let all the users to make any kind of programs; the screen was pretty good, with 320×240 pixels and it used a couple of rechargeable batteries that last more than seven hours of use. So I thought that I had the device, but not the software, and started to make a very simple text reader. Once I made it, I started to read a lot of books in English, and given the fact that I’m Spanish, I thought that a automatic dictionary will be very useful for me, so I added it to my software. Programming this device was not very hard because of the SDK provided, but if you wanted to had control over all the components of the software, like the type of the text, you had to program everything from scratch, so I threw the SKD out and programmed everything again using very simple C statements and designing all the functions to capture the buttons events, writing on the screen (poking a number over an address that represented a pixel on the screen),… that is, C programming but at a very low level. Hard, but amazing, like building a ship model using tiny wood pieces. Once I had a stable version of the software I released it for free, so other people using the same handheld could read text as well. But I saw that we had a lot of programs for our beloved handheld (mainly games and emulators) but launching them was a headache because you had to reset the device any time you wanted to run a different application. So I started programming a kind of operating system with the following goals: • Easy to use, with the appearance we had in our windows xp desktops, same left and right buttons functionality, start menu, … and I call it Wind-ups • Easy to launch as the main software when you switched on the handheld, so it will be always ready to use. And the same time, I wanted this project to be the continuity of my text reader, so I integrated it as a module of the “operating system”. When I had all this working stable, I continued adding more modules like an address book, image viewer, a simple text editor (just in case you need to write a quick note), a file browser, a word translator, … Given the fact that all these things have been done as a hobby, this project hasn’t had deadlines: when I had some free time I’ve programmed for a while, maybe just an easy module or just to modify or improve something. The last thing I added was this year, in February, a 3D viewer for panoramic pictures and given the fact that not many people is using this handheld at the moment, probably I’ll close this project or if I continue it, I will choose a new hardware, like the Android phones that are coming. I’ve recorded a video to show how the software works that you can see here: http://www.f-labs.com/gp32/wind-ups/video And all the documentation about the project can be found here: http://www.f-labs.com/gp32/wind-ups/

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