Subject: [E3-hacking] Making life easy for you

From: Cliff <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 18:14:09 +0100

Hi folks,

I've been extremely entertained by the traffic on this list (in fact we're desparate for software engineers and the work some of you have achieved would definitely qualify you for a top spot on our consideration list!).

Anyway, what we're thinking of doing is selling an "open" Linux development board based on the E3. You'd basically get an OMAP 5910 board (150MHz ARM925T + 150MHz C55x DSP) with a PS/2 keyboard (the pull out QWERTY), 32MB Nand, 128K Nor, 32MB DRAM and, the 480x320 colour screen attached along with power supplies etc. Everything to make a little (possibly portable?) Linux computer. However we might not populate the modem as, in this day and age, PSTN is a bit "old hat" as a transport for IP.

As in-house experiments we've even got things like QT/E, Opera and Skelmir JVM ported to it and have worked on stuff like 802.11g too so it's very easy to run a whole host of apps on the thing (nothing necessarily to do with telephony - could be anything "Linux" really). It'd come pre-loaded with the Montavista 2.4.18 kernel, busybox, etc and it's quite a simple process to use a USB-ethernet adaptor on it and NFS mount to a Redhat (or similar) server. You can also log on via a serial terminal or telnet into it. It makes for a very neat little Linux development environment. Naturally, if we did this, we WOULD give you access to the source for things like the 2.4.18 kernel and our Nand, LCD, keyboard driving stuff. We probably couldn't offer much in the way of support though.

However, the one thing we couldn't do would be to sell it for £49 because the phone is sold at a loss that we only recover through ongoing usage. However we'd hope that we might be able to do this for around the original E3 price. Looking at other (typically PC/104 size) Linux development boards they seem to go for anything from $200 upward (often a lot more) and generally don't have as high a spec for Nand or Dram and they most definitely do NOT have a 480 x 320, 3375 colour LCD at that price, so we like to think we might be doing the Linux development community a favour (about time you're probably thinking!) by offering a cheap/open development platform like this.

At the moment this is just an idea and whether we put the effort into doing it is really based on developer feedback as to whether you'd be interested? Please contact me and let me know what you think.

Cliff Lawson, Amstrad

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 18:14:37 +0100 (BST)

Hi Cliff,

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Cliff wrote:

> You'd basically get an OMAP 5910 board
> (150MHz ARM925T + 150MHz C55x DSP)

...this is a shame.  Couldn't we have a newer OMAP?  Even 1623, with its 
stacked DDR part, would be a major improvement over 5910.

2420 would, of course, be a killer part :-)

-J.,
ex-TI

---

From: Jonathan McDowell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 12:26:57 +0100

On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 06:14:09PM +0100, Cliff wrote:
 
> I've been extremely entertained by the traffic on this list (in fact
> we're desparate for software engineers and the work some of you have
> achieved would definitely qualify you for a top spot on our
> consideration list!).

Heh. I'd noticed Amstrad had been looking at the list and wondered if we
were ever going to hear anything from them. :)

> Anyway, what we're thinking of doing is selling an "open" Linux
> development board based on the E3.
...
> As in-house experiments we've even got things like QT/E, Opera and
> Skelmir JVM ported to it and have worked on stuff like 802.11g too so
> it's very easy to run a whole host of apps on the thing (nothing
> necessarily to do with telephony - could be anything "Linux" really).
> It'd come pre-loaded with the Montavista 2.4.18 kernel, busybox, etc
> and it's quite a simple process to use a USB-ethernet adaptor on it
> and NFS mount to a Redhat (or similar) server. You can also log on via
> a serial terminal or telnet into it. It makes for a very neat little
> Linux development environment.  Naturally, if we did this, we WOULD
> give you access to the source for things like the 2.4.18 kernel and
> our Nand, LCD, keyboard driving stuff.  We probably couldn't offer
> much in the way of support though.

That would be nice; with access to the NAND code it should hopefully be
possible to use something like JFFS2 instead, giving a writable file
system. Plus it would help with getting the kernel updated to 2.6 - I
know Vince Sanders has been talking about trying to get better OMAP
support in the mainline kernel.

> However, the one thing we couldn't do would be to sell it for -L-49
> because the phone is sold at a loss that we only recover through
> ongoing usage. However we'd hope that we might be able to do this for
> around the original E3 price.

That's £100, isn't it? Or was it originally sold for more than that?

> At the moment this is just an idea and whether we put the effort into
> doing it is really based on developer feedback as to whether you'd be
> interested? Please contact me and let me know what you think.

Do I think you'd sell these for £100? Certainly, especially if it was
packaged nicely. I bought an E3 for the purposes of hacking on partly
due to the fact that the idea of decent SIP/IAX phone appealed. You'd
probably find others who felt the same way and who would buy something
in the style of the E3 but without the Amstrad proprietary software but
a development environment instead.

Personally, it's unlikely I'd buy a developer model at the start - not
because I don't want one, just that it's hard to justify even more toys
at present. :)

J.

-- 
101 things you can't have too much of : 33 - Jokes.