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

From: Cliff Lawson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:23:54 +0100

But the board we have working (as anyone who's "broken in" to an E3 will
know) is the 5910. We're not going to make a board specially for this but
will simply re-use E3 boards but will probably go the trouble of making some
form of case to house the board and the display.

Cliff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: 15 June 2005 18:15
> To: [email-masked]; Discussion of the Amstrad E3 emailer
> hardware/software
> Subject: Re: [E3-hacking] Making life easy for you
> 
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> e3-hacking mailing list
> [email-masked]
> http://www.earth.li/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking
> 

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---

From: Jasmine Strong <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:25:24 +0100

> form of case to house the board and the display.

Ah okay, sounds cool, especially if we get some documentation :-)

-J.

---

From: Will <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:42:17 +0100

> form of case to house the board and the display.

Just to add my lurking opinion to this debacle. I wouldn't be at all 
interested in a Linux box with simple IO. If I was I think I'd have 
already bought one of the other Linux mini-PC type devices (gumstix 
etc). What I would buy is an unsubsidised E3 with easy access for 
developers to upload software onto (USB etc).

There is no other commonly available device on the market today like the 
E3 (reasonably powerful, colour screen and phone) and this would be the 
ultimate open standards voip / videophone platform once the linux 
hackers got their hands on it. I think Amstrad would reap the rewards 
allowing open source developers to develop for it, which it could then 
apply into it's own product line if it chose to (with suitable revenue 
generating modifications).

Example of software modifications; porting of emulators (of sufficient 
age so copyright isn't a big issue), a basic word processor, a decent 
web browser, an instant messaging client to it etc etc.

Sure, I'd love to pay £49 for it and have it do this stuff. But to keep 
Amstrad happy (and in business) I'd be more than happy to pay a decent 
amount for one instead.

Will

---

From: en4rab <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:24:46 -0700 (PDT)

Just to add my 2 pence worth to the discussion, yes i would be
interested in an open E3 emailer, but not in a tin as was suggested but
just an E3 that is open for more development.
I initally bought an E2 on impulse because i needed an arm based device
to test a homemade jtag lead on and to learn more about jtag debugging
and what it could do. 
I did have an idea that it might be an interesting device to play with
but i lack the skills to make it do anything usefull.
But the ideas i had are still there and the E3 has the hardware to do
them.
I would love to have an open E3 sitting on my desk next to my PC which I
could use as both a phone/answering machine for my regular landline, but
also be connected via a USB network adapter (be it ethernet or wireless)
so it could be a news feed display, an IM client, it would be fantastic
if it would run aMSN (an open source MSN messenger client with audio and
video support, i think amsn supports video now), its a shame skype isnt
open source too :)
The other things it would be nice to have would be to have it check my
email, or be a pretty and accurate clock with an ntp daemon, or any one
of a hundred other usefull things a little desktop linux phone could do.
It might even be able to replace my ugly dell dimension smoothwall box
lol
For me it is the current form factor that makes the E3 so attractive, I
have plenty of metal tins, but none that I would want to make a
phonecall on or have sitting on my desktop.
That is the ideas I had about the emailer.
As it was I was successfull in my jtag experiments (although the
homemade wigggler seemed a little flaky) and I put the E2 in the
cupboard untill the developments with pblq and the boot monitor stirred
my interest again.

Oh and a note on security since you said you were plannign on
implimenting signed updates and such like, you might want to consider
epoxy on the nor flash chips pins, as you would be surprised how many
people can remove and refit TSOP's with cheap gas cat or solderpro
butane powered soldering irons, and keep the jtag port unconnected, it
took me about 10 mins to find and verify the port on the E2, and about 8
hours to dump the bootloader a byte at a time lol
en4rab

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