Simpad 2nd Life - New Mainboard, Put a new mainboard in a Simpad Options

[voyager2003]

Hi,

I have a nearly new WP50 simpad + base station that is catching dust.
It would be nice to use it to browse the net a bit. But no wifi etc. so this wont work.
I could try to work around this but there are so many limitations..

Did anyone here found a good/cost effective way to make use of a CL4/WP50?
Did anyone try to replace the mainboard, perhaps by some ARM based board that is popular now with all the ipad clones that are coming out, or perhaps a "FriendlyARM" alike board?

Tnx,
~W.

[Snappy]

I had an SL4 years back ... was sweet and had a PCCARD running with wifi. Make sure you check that the chipset is supported. Try search for some of my earlier posts. I think there were posts regarding wifi CF and PCCard cards.

Are you running OE on it or Opie or Angstrom?

[voyager2003]

It is a WP50 so it does not have the PCCard interface. Only possible way I could think of is to make some kind of DECT bridge. Software on it is still original as its pretty much useless to flash it with something else.

Maybe I should just forget about it and wait until a cheap and stable android tablet is released..

Anyway, As I saw various posts about simpads breaking down there must be others that have a case with a good screen but a bad mainboard or who are just not too happy about what the simpad is capable of. It should be possible to replace the mainboard for less than 100 euros with something that is more up to date.

I checked around a bit, friendlyarm has a board with an ARM9 that is 10x10 cm and a ARM11 that is 11x11 cm in size.
The ARM9 has a 400 MHz Samsung S3C2440, the ARM11 has a 533 MHz Samsung S3C6410 ARM11.
Things available on these boards are SDCard slot, RJ45, mini USB, for serial ports, jtag, tvout, audio out, IR, USB Host etc.

Fitting the board and getting linux, WinCE or android running on it wont be too much of a problem.
There are images available for these boards.

However, connecting the screen is something I did not figure out yet.
The simpads use a Toshiba 8.4" TFT LCD. If I got it right, this would be the LTM08C343S.

CN1 on the panel side should be:
1 GND
2 GND
3 NCLK SAMPLING CLOCK
4 GND
5 R0 - RED DISPLAY DATA (LSB)
6 R1 - RED DISPLAY DATA
7 R2 - RED DISPLAY DATA
8 R3 - RED DISPLAY DATA
9 R4 - RED DISPLAY DATA
10 R5 - RED DISPLAY DATA (MSB)
11 GND
12 G0 - GREEN DISPLAY DATA (LSB)
13 G1 - GREEN DISPLAY DATA
14 G2 - GREEN DISPLAY DATA
15 G3 - GREEN DISPLAY DATA
16 G4 - GREEN DISPLAY DATA
17 G5 - GREEN DISPLAY DATA (MSB)
18 GND
19 B0 - BLUE DISPLAY DATA (LSB)
20 B1 - BLUE DISPLAY DATA
21 B2 - BLUE DISPLAY DATA
22 B3 - BLUE DISPLAY DATA
23 B4 - BLUE DISPLAY DATA
24 B5 - BLUE DISPLAY DATA (MSB)
25 GND
26 ENAB - COMPOUND SYNCHRONIZATION SIGNAL
27 VDD - +3.3V POWER SUPPLY
28 VDD - +3.3V POWER SUPPLY
29 GND
30 GND

Listed features for the arm boards:
STN-Displays
• 4bit dual scan, 4bit single scan or 8bit single scan display type
• monochrome, 4 gray levels, 16 gray levels, 256 colors or 4096 colors
• Max: 1024x768
TFT-Display
• 1, 2, 4 or 8 bpp palletized color displays
• 16 or 24 bpp non-palletized true-color displays
• Max: 1024x768, 64k colors

I got the pinout for the ARM boards but those have somewhat different signals and I did not find out how to get this right yet.
It became a bit much to handle after reading about frequency adjustments and kernel patching.
Any other board with similar specifications would do as well, for me the main problem at the moment is getting the display connected and working.

~W