Messages

1

PocketPenguin / Software

« on: October 01, 2007, 06:30:38 pm »

Wow, the archos 605 seems to be almost just what I want. I wouldn't hesitate for a second if there was open software for it. I really want something that I can hack around with and it would also be nice to have an open OS running on it so that I could play any media types that I want.

2

PocketPenguin / Software

« on: September 30, 2007, 11:45:14 pm »

Sorry about the cryptic description of my ideas with qemu, I wrote it in a hurry.

I thought it would be nice if we could use qemu to emulate the PP. We could use qemu to emulate each chip but then import a netlist from gEDA to tell qemu how the chips are connected together. This would give us greater hardware emulation for the hardware design and would also allow to take advantage of the imx31's ability to hook everything up in several different ways. That way we could just hook the chips together in gEDA, export that to a netlist, and load it into qemu and have it emulate what we just drew up. Then as the hardware design changes, or people need to adapt the design to their own needs, they can simply change the schematic, get the netlist, and start emulating their new design.

Sorry, I'm in a hurry tonight too with school and all so I hope that makes sense. I mentioned spice before but I quickly realized that would be overboard and much harder to implement. If it still doesn't make sense, then it is probably too complicated and/or unnecessary to our needs as a hobby project. As I think about how all this would be accomplished I agree that the benefits would probably not be enough to warrant all of the work that it would take, however it may prove to be useful if enough of the people who design the PP actually use it.

I'm running out of time so I'll leave it at that. You guys sound like you have much more of this kind of design experience than I do so I'll leave it up to your wisdom.

Real quick, for the media player I'm thinking that I will use much of the hardware you guys have been talking about. Some of the features I'm thinking about:

ATA 1.8" hard drive
WLAN
External USB
Large touch screen [the larger one you guys were talking about (5" ?) or maybe slightly larger, I haven't looked into it much and don't know much about them]
Video Out
High quality sound (haven't looked into that much either)
Bluetooth (maybe, so I can carry around one of those folding keyboards if I need it)

Basically I still want it to be like a pda but much more media based. Really, it will have much of the hardware in common with the PP (power management, wlan, bluetooth, usb). Actually the new iPod touch is close to what I want except the hard drive is too small, and after having an iPod, I really don't want my media to be locked down like that. Not to mention with an open hardware and software design I could add any sort of functionality I decide to it. I do understand that this won't be as small as any commercial device but I don't expect to be able to reach those sizes on my budget. I'm more interested in functionality really.

3

PocketPenguin / Software

« on: September 26, 2007, 09:36:07 pm »

DB, how far along are you with the design of the electronics?

I'm not asking to rush you I was just wondering where I can help out. Have you worked out any schematics yet? I am willing to assist in this process by helping to create any symbols or footprints that you may need for gEDA. I have no experience creating these in gEDA but I am picking it up relatively quickly. If you need help with this, we will need a list of exactly what chips we will be using, etc.

Also, you said you have ideas for how the design of the case and layout of the electronics will go, it would be nice to get some quick sketches up so we have an idea of what you would like to work towards. I think it would also attract more people to help if they could see where this project is headed.

I would also be interested in working on qemu emulation for the hardware. I have lots of programming knowledge but zero knowledge about qemu, but I think it is something I could work out. This would mostly be beneficial to the software development for the PDA.

I was thinking of a way that qemu could be used to aid in hardware design and I think it would be interesting to modify qemu to work almost like a circuit analysis program. We could program the behavior of the signals of each chip in qemu and then import a netlist from gEDA to define the connections between the chips. This would be sort of a combined circuit analysis / hardware emulation program. It would, however, be tedious to program the behavior of each signal especially with the ability of the i.mx31 to change the functions of its pins but I think it could be done with some work and would end up being very beneficial to the development process and would greatly lower the costs of having to have multiple prototype PCBs made.

One problem to overcome would be to emulate the signals as the pass through different components between chips. However, one solution to this may be to use spice. We would then have a mix of qemu and spice in order to emulate this device.

I am quite interested in helping to get this project off the ground because I am planning on designing a portable media player that would be very similar to this device, except with some modifications (ata hard drive, no gsm, more sound/video output, etc.)

Let me know if I can help, because I know you are busy.


-Duncan