Thu, 06 Apr 2006
The Gumstix kit I pieced together arrived today. It...is...totally...awesome.
The platform is an Intel Xscale CPU at 400Mhz with 64 megs of RAM and 4 megs
flash storage. The size of this platform is literally the size of a stick of
old school chewing gum. Not that new school dentyne ice or even the old school
bubalicious, but the regular wrigley style. It weighs about the same too.
The platform comes with a fully functional Linux kernel with a lot of userland
programs on the 4 megs of flash. It leavs only 400K to spare. busybox and
dropbear are there for big binaries, some other stuff stands on it's own. The
kernel is based on the 2.6.11 source and has modules for only the chipsets on
the Gumstix expansion boards. A notable module is the prism2_cs driver for
compact flash wifi cards.
The I/O expansion boards I got combine to give the tiny platform an ethernet
network port, compact flash, USB 2.0, serial terminal and audio
playback/recording. Connecting the serial cabled to a desktop and powering on
the device worked and presented a login prompt for a bash shell. After about an
hour of messing with the software, I could load all the drivers for all the
I/O, download an mp3 file and play it back over headphones. A little while
later I got ambitious and piped an mp3 stream via wget to madplay and it played
back internet radio.
The built in software also has sshd and a web server (boa), both advertised via
zeroconf (aka Rendevous, aka Bonjour) for auto discovery. And to make it even
crazier, the company maintains patches for lots of other applications and
instructions on how to build a new root filesystem and reflash the device. Any
open source software that can compile for the ARM archetecture can run on this
thing.
It is totally awesome. I recommend everyone with about $260 to spare go get one
right now. Considering everything it does it's cheaper than most PDAs and
portable music devices.
posted at: 11:00 | path:
/embedded |
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