[E3-hacking] Quick update on E2 work

[David Given]

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 15:28 +0100, Matt Evans wrote:
[...]
> Just thought I'd say what I've been working on currently - had a slow 
> fortnight w/o much time to spare for it but...

Hah. I've just bought a house. Suddenly I don't seem to have any time
any more...

[...]
> I've found the NAND support to be interesting.  It's my intention to 
> have it be able to scan internal NAND (and SmartMedia) for headers of 
> code to load/jump to, much as PBL does.  The raw NAND contains some 
> strange stuff;  there is some sort of FTL in force here.

Oo. I didn't know that; I thought PBL was giving me the raw data
directly... hmm. This makes a big difference for the stuff I'm doing;
now I know that I can call PBL routines and get *reliable* data off the
flash. (It also explains why the PBL flash access routines are so
complex!)

[...]
> Would be a cool development cycle to just blast stuff 
> onto SMC card and plug it in rather than waiting for it to download 
> over serial.

I'm not entirely sure that my E2 *has* an SMC socket. There's certainly
no metal socket soldered to the motherboard; someone suggested that it
might be possible to insert a card and have it make contact with the
metal tabs on the motherboard without needing a socket, but I'm not
convinced of this. I'm still trying to scrounge one up to find it.

How complex would a minimal USB stack be? Could we load data off a USB
storage device?

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+- David Given --McQ-+ 
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