[E3-hacking] Making life easy for you

[Jonathan McDowell]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 12:43:57PM +0100, Cliff Lawson wrote:
> > That's £100, isn't it? Or was it originally sold for more than that?
> £100 is roughly what we were thinking. I couldn't guarantee that it
> would be exactly that might be a bit more (or possibly less even). The
> more I look at other Linux dev systems the more I think £100 (inc the
> 480x320 colour LCD) is really cheap. Others have pointed me in the
> direction of www.gumstix.com and
> http://www.kwikbyte.com/KB9202_description_new.htm#BuyNowKB9202 as
> examples of other "cheap" dev systems. But they have dramatically less
> resources on the board and obviously no sign of an LCD, let alone a
> colour one.

Yeah, it's definitely cheap. Simtec (http://www.simtec.co.uk/) have a
board for £99, but it's only a 7500FE and still needs RAM/display etc.

> > Do I think you'd sell these for £100? Certainly, especially if it
> > was packaged nicely. I bought an E3 for the purposes of hacking on
> > partly due to the fact that the idea of decent SIP/IAX phone
> > appealed. You'd probably find others who felt the same way and who
> > would buy something in the style of the E3 but without the Amstrad
> > proprietary software but a development environment instead.
> To be clear this (probably) wouldn't be in the style of an E3.

Sorry, I wasn't saying it should be, more that if you wanted to cut your
work you could probably get away with the current cases.

...
> I think we probably would put a JTAG header on it for those interested
> in such things (though maybe this isn't such a necessity now that
> Linux is ported)

JTAG is useful for people who'd want to play with alternative boot
loaders; one of the more commonly used ARM ones perhaps.

> > Personally, it's unlikely I'd buy a developer model at the start -
> > not because I don't want one, just that it's hard to justify even
> > more toys at present. :)
> Fair enough. If you know others doing Linux development then feel free
> to mention this and see what they think. I'm just interested in as
> much feedback as possible right now to decide whether to launch off in
> this direction. While there (hopefully!) wouldn't be much work to be
> done on our part, there would be some and we need to gauge whether
> such effort would be economically justified.

Sure, if I can think of people who'd be interested I'll mention it to
them.

J.

-- 
If I save time, when do I get it back?