Subject: [E3-hacking] Newbie E3 owner

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:30:29 -0400

Hi,

I recently bought a couple of E3s from eBay (£25 each exc. shipping,  
sadly I've had no luck finding brand new ones for £10 or whatever).  
One of them was clearly new and has v4.9, however the other turned out  
to have been used (looks new and still has stickers, but some parts of  
the packaging are missing and it has some woman's name in it, with PBL  
v5.1. And some phone book entries, although I can't find them in  
Amstrad's GUI...

Anyway, I obviously bought both to play with, so I had a few ideas:

1) to set one up with a wired ethernet USB adapter and a hard disk  
(via a USB hub?), my plan being to make one of them into a small  
file/subversion server that's less power hungry than a Dell PowerEdge  
or whatever.

2) to set one up in the kitchen as a mini internet terminal, allowing  
people to look up e-mails/recipes, edit the shopping list, etc. via a  
wifi dongle

3) use the modem in one as a PBX endpoint to the public telephone  
system (allowing me to set up Asterisk/etc. on another machine),  
whilst having it work as a VoIP unit

4) Videoconferencing between other systems :)

Anyway, has anyone tried any of these? I've had a look round the wiki  
and the past e-mails here but it's not really clear what the present  
state of drivers/etc. are - I don't mind working on drivers either  
(although my experience with drivers is primarily on OSX and a small  
amount on Windows)

Finally, is there anything I can do with the v5.1 unit, or should I  
just send it back to the person I bought it from? I was wondering if  
anybody had succeeded persuading it to talk (by the looks of here and  
the wiki, no), or if anyone had tried anything more hardcore - I had  
the notion of trying to do something like putting the CPU into a  
hi-impedence state and attempting to write the Flash in-situ from an  
external device, or capturing the contents of the Flash as the system  
starts using an FPGA and attempting to reverse engineer it. Or is  
there something simpler like a JTAG connector?

Thanks,
Colin

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From: Andy Collins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 21:47:13 +0100

> to have been used (looks new and still has stickers, but some parts of
--snip--

> (although my experience with drivers is primarily on OSX and a small

Hi Colin,

Some interesting ideas there. Having looked through the available  
docs on the state of this project they look feasible but I'm  
something of a newbie here so your milage may vary.

My own plans are to use an E3 as a music player, using a hacked  
Netgear WGT384u storage router as the server or possibly to use it as  
a stand-alone mp3 player for the car.

Interesting times ahead I suspect.

All the best.

Andy.

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From: Jasmine Strong <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 13:50:43 -0700

> a stand-alone mp3 player for the car.

The OMAP5910 in the E3 is just barely fast enough to play mp3s
if the bitrate is pretty low;  you do need to use an integer decoder,
as it has no floating point hardware.  However, the audio hardware
is not really up to the job, so you'll either need to modify your e3
(no, I'm not sure what the options are) or use a USB audio device.

-J.

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From: David Given <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Jul 2007 23:36:21 +0100

[email-masked] wrote:
[...]
> (although my experience with drivers is primarily on OSX and a small  

As far as the kernel goes, pretty much everything works, mostly. There's a
nice user-friendly OpenEmbedded distro that works if you want to try it ---
but you'll still need a level converter cable to reflash the thing, of course.

I've had Debian running quite successfully on mine, using a USB1 hard drive
and wireless ethernet. It's slow but not as much so as you might think;
recompiling the kernel takes a few hours. The slow hard drive means that
anything data-centric is unpleasant, and the low amount of memory means that
anything memory-centric is even more unpleasant because it involves swapping,
which involves that USB1 bus... but it's perfectly usable as a testbed system.

If you want to do anything involving audio encoding/decoding or video
encoding/decoding you'll probably need to work the DSP; the ARM is low-powered
to begin with, and has no FPU. There are some open-source DSP tools, but there
may not be an open source OMAP compiler (I haven't found one).

I haven't done anything with mine for ages because I breadboard-based
converter cable failed (all the wires pulled out!) and while I have a cheapo
USB phone cable that will work, I still need to put a plug on it.
Unfortunately, most embedded Linux toolchains these days want a bit more
memory than the E3's 32MB. It'd be nice to use something like Maemo, but I
doubt that would be at all feasible... I did nearly get GPE running on it
once, but it chronically ran out of memory; someone else on the list had more
luck with QTopia (check the list archives).

- --
┌── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ─── http://www.cowlark.com ───────────────────
│
│ "Anything that makes people that angry is worth doing again." --- Scott
│ Adams

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From: "Piotr Michniewski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2007 08:20:22 +0200

> luck with QTopia (check the list archives).

I've been thinking lately about resoldering 64MB of RAM and 128MB of
Flash on the E3 with a hot air station. I think it should be possible
and it would greatly improve the experience.

-- 
Piotr Michniewski

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From: "M P" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2007 16:20:58 +0100

On 7/4/07, David Given <[email-masked]> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>

Turns out you can find MAX232 level converters for really cheap on
ebay. I got some that are breadboard compatible with a DB9 on one tiny
board for $9. I use them for my AVR project so I don't even have to
have full RS232 on the pcb at all, just a couple of RX/TX pins.

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From: "z4!" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:45:04 +0100

Do you have a url for the item ?

M P wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> e3-hacking mailing list
> [email-masked]
> http://www.earth.li/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking
>

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From: David Given <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 13:40:29 +0100

> Do you have a url for the item ?

A while ago I bought an incredibly cheap PL2303 USB serial cable; this should
be ideal. It would appear that making it work ought to be just a matter of
snipping off the Nokia plug and soldering on a stereo jack. Unfortunately, I
never got round to doing it and now, er, I've lost it.

http://www.cowlark.com/amstrad.html

(The PL2303 is a USB-to-TTL-serial chip. It's designed to be plugged into a
MAX232 to produce line level serial, which, of course, the E3 doesn't need.
The big advantage here is that it's powered straight off the USB bus and
doesn't use up a PC serial port.)

- --
┌── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ─── http://www.cowlark.com ───────────────────
│
│ "There does not now, nor will there ever, exist a programming language in
│ which it is the least bit hard to write bad programs." --- Flon's Axiom

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 18:41:35 -0400

> but you'll still need a level converter cable to reflash the thing,   

I had already made a cable before it arrived - a simpler zener diode  
cable. It seems to work fine anyway, as I was able to flash it with  
the "starter" Linux distro you can download. Next step will be to try  
and build something myself ;)

> may not be an open source OMAP compiler (I haven't found one).

I had a quick Google around, the only thing I found is  
https://www-a.ti.com/downloads/sds_support/LinuxDspTools/index.html,  
which is supposedly some sort of Linux-based (but I don't think Open  
Source) tools for OMAP5912 development (ours is a OMAP5910?). I can't  
install it presently anyway as I have no X-enabled Linux machines, and  
it has some bizarre InstallShield installer.

Anyway, it's good to see a community still exists. I thought the  
mailing list looked a bit quiet before I posted, but there seems to be  
plenty of people still :)

Colin

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From: "Craig M. Ling" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:02:35 +0200

Hi Guys
I have been following these posts long enough now for me to actually want to
dig out my E3 and begin work.

Is there a place with a definitive guide to do this, including a schematic
for the cable?

Regards

-- 
Dell Certified Systems Expert

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From: Ralph Corderoy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:53:25 +0100

Hi sciros,

> Do you have a url for the item ?

Is this the kind of thing you're after?

    http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120140629980

Cheers,

Ralph.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:37:36 -0400

> Is there a place with a definitive guide to do this, including a schematic

I made the cable at http://wiki.earth.li/Serial_cable_for_the_paranoid  
from entirely new parts, about £5 from Maplin including some hugely  
overpriced cable I think it was.

To try it out, I flashed my E3 using the guide at  
http://www.pavier.co.uk/e3_getting_started.html

Both are linked to from http://wiki.earth.li/E3

No obvious guide for making your own ROMs though, so I plan to figure  
that out for myself next :)

Colin