Please apologise my lack of knowledge in this part of hardware design, but can someone explain, how the additional MPU could help to "solve" a problem I think the current design may have?
The GTA0?s have a GPS chip which will provide NMEA-data via an UART interface. One of the (imho) most important advanced features of the GTA?s is the possibility to provide location based information. If I want to use this feature all the time, the GPS chip will deliver data packets continuously and therefore one has to take care continuously. At the moment (looking at the PDF diagram) for the most simple usage (record the NMEA-data) the regular CPU has to be used continuously, which will degrade battery life significantly. How will the MPU help in this case? Can the MPU used as a kind of "data buffer" to reduce the amount of CPU wakeups? I do not want to sound rude, but just a "long-life" telephone seems not to be the killer feature the world waits for. If you combine this "long-life" telephone with a "long-life" location aware PDA, you will meet more needs. But maybe my intentions of usage of the GTA?s is different to that of all others? The most valuable scenarios for me are to record my trips into the nature (hiking and biking) and to get pointed to interesting sites nearby. I don't know how much current the GPS chip consumes and if it is possible at all, regarding battery capacity, to run this beast continuously, but it would be an outstanding feature if one could record the GPS data for a whole day. Regrads Karsten _______________________________________________ hardware mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/hardware
