SL-C3000 dissect pics Options

[tke918]

It's in Japanese but a lot of pictures of dissected SL-C3000!
http://www.ayati.com/kobako/c3bara.htm

[Xumbi]

That's pretty cool. It looks like he/she was able to replace the microdrive with a 1GB CF card. If that's possible, maybe it would be possible to put a CF wifi card in there (very carefully), or replace it with a bigger microdrive.

[kbranch]

If that's possible, maybe it would be possible to put a CF wifi card in there (very carefully), or replace it with a bigger microdrive.

It doesn't look like there's enough room for a WiFi card unless there's one that doesn't stick out of the slot at all. I don't see any reason you couldn't put a Socket BT card in there, though.

[kahm]

Other than the fact that replacing the Hard drive with a connectivity card means that the 3000 has NO internal storage. Someone would first have to hack a rom for it in such a way that the Z fs ran off of an SD card, similar to the old Pflinders/Crow/Cacko roms.

Remember - it only has 16mb flash. And with a fat32 hard drive, I'll have to agree with an earlier posting on the board that said that they would just store their kernel image on the HD and loop mount it.

[Xumbi]

Good point, and running off SD would be very slow.

[victor]

That's pretty cool.  It looks like he/she was able to replace the microdrive with a 1GB CF card.  If that's possible, maybe it would be possible to put a CF wifi card in there (very carefully), or replace it with a bigger microdrive.

As far as I can tell from the babelfish translation, replacing the hard drive with a cf card did not actually result in a functional zaurus.

[bgsfh]

The thing these pics could be most useful for is for what is not there. The C3000 is the first model of another series of Zauri. It could be seen as the equivalent of the C700 that came out just over a year ago. The C700 was followed up by enhanced models in short order. Could people who work with this kind of stuff regularly look for space that may be reserved for the features to be released on subsequent models? Features like room for antenna placement or daughter cards, extra bus lines for different chips, ect.? I know the pics are small and the features are tiny, but I thought I would ask.

[ZeeUser]

Does anyone know where any more disection pics of the C3000 can be found? I need to confirm what graphics chip it is using. The pics at ayati.com do not show enough detail. At first I though (hoped) the C3000 used the Intel 2700G, but now I am not sure.

[tke918]

Does anyone know where any more disection pics of the C3000 can be found? I need to confirm what graphics chip it is using. The pics at ayati.com do not show enough detail. At first I though (hoped) the C3000 used the Intel 2700G, but now I am not sure.

more pics here
ATI imageon is gone from C3000. I don't think it has 2700G. It seems that C3000 uses just PXA270 integrated LCD controller. doh!

[ZeeUser]

That just took the wind out of my sails. And I am supposed to be receiving my C3000 today! The most I can hope for now is for the PXA270 to match the graphics performance of the PXA255/ATi Imageon 100 combo. The PXA270's "Wireless MMX" should pick up some of the slack(?) Anyways, the Imageon has not been utilized to it's full potential due to the closed-source drivers, and what drivers have been hacked together thus far are buggy/incomplete.

tke918:
Thanks for the pics, despite the bad news they bring. I would have learned about this eventually, anyways

[ZeeUser]

I did a Systran.com translation of part of this article (credit to tke918 for posting the link). There is some info that gives me hope for the C3000, if the translation proves to be correct. I will not comment on the article, though, because even where I can decipher the translation, I only have a vauge understanding of the technical information.

(PXA270 Graphics Capabilities)

As for main CPU, PXA270 of Intel. The clock is 416MHz. Function of wireless MMX and the like is added in comparison with PXA255, accumulates also the various peripheral circuits as the one for PDA device. This time there is no ATI W100, but the LCD controller of PXA270 built-in is utilized in regard to indication. In addition, the function and the like where W100 processed until recently in the type seems that is actualized with the software entirely.

The LCD controller of PXA270 corresponds to the largest 800×600 dot, those whose two graphic overlays are possible. When there is an overlay display function, playback processing of the animated picture data becomes simple. Because it should have kept writing the animated picture frame data to the overlay private memory territory animated picture playback application - without considering Shaun's itself indicatory and display position and the like. In addition, in the overlay indication of PXA270, YCbCr which is used with JPEG and MPEG not only RGB type (brightness and color difference) indication being possible even with type, it is not necessary to do color spatial conversion at the time of indication. The frame buffer is taken into memory, uses DMA and to LCD has reached the point where output is done.

The LCD controller of PXA250/255 which was used with SL-C700 - 860, is thought that display function of the simple frame buffer furthermore the device like ATI W100 in the shelf damaging and indication of the multimedia data was necessary. Vis-a-vis this, the LCD controller of PXA270 function becomes high, in addition, because there is also wireless MMX order and the like the external graphic controller unnecessary. In addition, it meaning that the device decreases, it is possible that much to decrease electric power consumption.

Thoughts, anyone?

[thseiler]

I did a Systran.com translation of part of this article (credit to tke918 for posting the link). There is some info that gives me hope for the C3000, if the translation proves to be correct. I will not comment on the article, though, because even where I can decipher the translation, I only have a vauge understanding of the technical information.

(PXA270 Graphics Capabilities)

As for main CPU, PXA270 of Intel. The clock is 416MHz. Function of wireless MMX and the like is added in comparison with PXA255, accumulates also the various peripheral circuits as the one for PDA device. This time there is no ATI W100, but the LCD controller of PXA270 built-in is utilized in regard to indication. In addition, the function and the like where W100 processed until recently in the type seems that is actualized with the software entirely.

The LCD controller of PXA270 corresponds to the largest 800×600 dot, those whose two graphic overlays are possible. When there is an overlay display function, playback processing of the animated picture data becomes simple. Because it should have kept writing the animated picture frame data to the overlay private memory territory animated picture playback application - without considering Shaun's itself indicatory and display position and the like. In addition, in the overlay indication of PXA270, YCbCr which is used with JPEG and MPEG not only RGB type (brightness and color difference) indication being possible even with type, it is not necessary to do color spatial conversion at the time of indication. The frame buffer is taken into memory, uses DMA and to LCD has reached the point where output is done.

The LCD controller of PXA250/255 which was used with SL-C700 - 860, is thought that display function of the simple frame buffer furthermore the device like ATI W100 in the shelf damaging and indication of the multimedia data was necessary. Vis-a-vis this, the LCD controller of PXA270 function becomes high, in addition, because there is also wireless MMX order and the like the external graphic controller unnecessary. In addition, it meaning that the device decreases, it is possible that much to decrease electric power consumption.

Thoughts, anyone?

Hi ZeeUser,

The ATI W100 in current Zauri does more ore less two things

* Color Space Transformation
* Video Overlay / HW Scaling

Color Space Transformation :
If you would have to describe an Image, you could save for every Pixel the amount of Red, Green and Blue that is needed to get its color. Such a Color Space is called RGB and you need 3 values per pixel. This is basically a *.BMP image

In video coding another way of describing an image is common: YCrCb
There you have aswell 3 values per pixel (Y = "luminance", intensity of a B&W image, Cr = "Chrominance Red", how much more red than green, Cb = "Chrominance Blue" - How much more blue than green)
You still have 3 values per pixel, But the eye is less sensitive to Color Difference that to light intensity, so it is possible to compress color difference more agressively
This would correspond to a *.jpg with maximum quality setting.

Now the problem is when you want to play back a video that was coded using YCrCb (like MPEG/divx) you will have to convert it back to RGB at some point, because the LCD works internally in RGB. In 700 Series this was done by ATI W100 because the PXA255 had no hardware converter and not enough computing power to do it in software alone. If you take a look at figure 7-1 of Intels PXA27X spec's you will find that PXA27X includes a hardware based Color Space transformer in its internal LCD controller.

Video Overlay / Scaling:
If you want your video (which uses YCrCb) in a window ontop of your desktop which uses RGB, you need a way to Mix Color Spaces . This is what the Overlay is for. It lays the video image over the normal one. PXA27X has actually *two* overlay units.
Then there is the scaler, which basically scales your video from its resolution to the reolution of the LCD (otherwise it would not be possible to to fullscreen video) This had to be done by ATI W100 in current Zauri, because PXA255 is not fast enough. But with Wireless MMX, this has changed.

IMHO this is a good thing:
* PXA27X is fully documented unlike the W100
* yon dont have an additional chip to buy, and
* you save power. SL-C7XX series uses W100 but PXA's internal controller is still there and consumes power doing nothing.

Over all Sharp had to put a W100 on the side of PXA255 because it was not yet up to the job. But PXA27X has grown and can stand on its own feet, so no need for W100 anymore.

tom

PS: I think, the mplayer which needs W100 will not work with C3000.
You need to wait until somebody adapts mplayer for PXA27X.