http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS2604014904.html
Atmel's now sampling a 400Mhz Arm-based SOC that runs at 400Mhz and draws 80mW at full power. It's got plenty of integrated peripherals, including several SD card interfaces and SPI serial interfaces, 10/100 ethernet, and all sorts of other goodies. It runs Linux, and costs $7 in quantities of 10,000 I'm a big fan or arduinos ( http://www.arduino.cc/ http://www.freeduino.org/ ). This seems like the perfect device to build a more-capable version for a similar cost. It's got 64K of rom built-in, which seems like enough for a bootloader that could boot USB or over the network. Etherboot / GPXE certainly fits in less. SD cards are getting cheaper by the day, so I wouldn't even solder any flash onto the thing, just ship it with an SD slot. The console could be redirected over a serial port or the network connection easily enough. It would be pretty easy to build breakout boards (much like arduino shields) that could contain anything from a SATA controller to a Wifi IC (they're commonly attached through SPI in the embedded world). It seems like, for around $40, one could build a fairly capable linux machine with plenty of GPIO lines, and expandability through SPI, USB, and Ethernet. Anyone up for a challenge? --tim _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
