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
On 3 Jul 2007, at 14:30, lists@mice-software.com wrote:
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
--snip--
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)
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.
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.
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.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
lists@mice-software.com wrote: [...]
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)
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
On 7/5/07, David Given dg@cowlark.com wrote:
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).
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.
On 7/4/07, David Given dg@cowlark.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
lists@mice-software.com wrote: [...] 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.
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.
Do you have a url for the item ?
M P wrote:
On 7/4/07, David Given dg@cowlark.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
lists@mice-software.com wrote: [...] 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.
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.
e3-hacking mailing list e3-hacking@earth.li http://www.earth.li/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
z4! wrote:
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
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.
Quoting David Given dg@cowlark.com:
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 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 ;)
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 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
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
On 7/11/07, lists@mice-software.com lists@mice-software.com wrote:
Quoting David Given dg@cowlark.com:
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 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 ;)
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 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
e3-hacking mailing list e3-hacking@earth.li http://www.earth.li/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/e3-hacking
Quoting "Craig M. Ling" craig.ling@gmail.com:
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
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
-
Andy Collins -
Craig M. Ling -
David Given -
Jasmine Strong -
lists＠mice-software.com -
M P -
Piotr Michniewski -
Ralph Corderoy -
z4!