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: jasmine@electronpusher.org [mailto:jasmine@electronpusher.org] Sent: 15 June 2005 18:15 To: cliff@ourcottage.plus.com; 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
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On 16 Jun 2005, at 09:23, Cliff Lawson wrote:
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.
Ah okay, sounds cool, especially if we get some documentation :-)
-J.
Cliff Lawson wrote:
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
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
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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Cliff Lawson -
en4rab -
Jasmine Strong -
Will