Intro & Faq

[speculatrix]

giga ether full duplex is going to be somewhat faster than even usb2.0 full speed (480 mega bits/sec); it's a pity it can't be provided on the CPU.

[Da_Blitz]

true but my point is why stick with 100mbps when yu can potentially get up to 400mbps half duplex, how you split it is up to you (i mean how many operations these days are 50/50 apart from p2p)

i have to credit the NSLU guys with this one, there are a couple of people doing it to get bettre than 10MB/s transfer on the slugs, using a gigabit adaptor in a usb2.0 port gives you up to around 35MB/s if you are lucky (ie low protocol overhead)

[ZTwinsen]

Hi everyone,

As u seen, I am new in here. When I dug the old posts, I am quite confuse for the spec of pocketpengium and hence I summarize it and ask for validation:

LCD: 5" 16(15?):9 transflextive (touchscreen?) slide-like, not tweak model like Cxx00
keyboard: prison5-like
USB: 2 full size full power host-client usb port
SD: 2 SDIO
CF: no
ethernet: use usb-ethernet
audio: usb-audio
CPU: freescale
Ram: 128Mb
Storage: ??
power: ~3.xV
Battery: Nokia battery put into serial for swapping
shape: clame shell like, 2 parts link by connector.. Upper part only contain a CPU, Ram, LCD and a battery. THe lower part contains I/O, keyboard and batteries.
built-in wifi, bluetooth, camera

Just let you know My personal pocketpengium usage objective:
1) Notetaking (for science classes which need to draw a lot charts and diagrams)
2) ebook reader for a long while
3) programming and research platform
4) (VNC terminal to) my desktop ^^
5) simple PIM stuff
6) dictionary
7) Handy Calc
8) never mp3 player and phone, but may be GSM
So power is very important for me....

I also have some suggestions and questions too,. Since the topic are board, I don't seperate them into different thread which is hard to trace. BTW, I don't have electronic background and low level background, plz don't bind if I raise some stupid idea. :)>



1) If we have so much built-in thing, can we cut the power for them to safe the power? I heard about the Cxx00's wifi of CF is a power monster.
2) Can the device set to "bypass" the battery when charger is used so the batteries won't hurt?
3) Is there anyway to use PSP's 5V external batteries? Those batteries are really cheap now....
4) I suggest to have 1 or 2 SOny Clie's "jog dial" like "gear"? It sounds crazy, but it is very useful for small screen device, especially for tasks like note-taking, drawing and web browsing.
5) If someone still think keyboard is too small, maybe we can try the IBM thinkpad's butterfly like keyboard.
6) But if we don't use cxx00 size keyboard, are there anyway to use keyboard without a table? It would be cool to play w/ my pocketpengium in a long line or inside public transport and watch the others carry a heavy M$ laptop which ran out of power.

Sorry for my long post :)>

Finally, I am not pushing, but when is the pocketpengium device come out?? I want it deadly........ What about this summer??

[Da_Blitz]

thans for your usage case, you have no idea how handy that is to have, i mostly get one or two "i do this or that" or i dont like that because i wont use it, having a usage case allows me too chose features and have justification behind this

now to answer your questions
(1) is a kernel thing, wifi has been and always be a power hog unless you tune the power settings (at the cost of responisvness and latencey, which is fine for teh web but not as good for ssh)
(2) yes, however keep in mind this can be dangerous if you pull teh plug and you get a 20ms power out, hence there is a mini backup reserve. not that you need to know or care about it but i think its worth putting here
(3) Perhaps, depends on avalability and sizing, this thing dosent even have a set case
(4) I like jog dials but i prefer a proper wheel, think htc hermes or trinity (i have both) its like a jog dial but keeps turning, great for mp3s and afaik i planned to have 2 already
(5) links, i have propsed several keyboard designs but anything other than the cxx00 tends to be rowned upon, my fav was a fold in half one that was a keying/corded keyboard when folded up. however most people dont want to learn a new keyboard layout.

i personally felt that for a Z a cordded keyboard would be nearly as fast as it allows you t better maintain a grip on the thing and means less odd keyboard combos (ctrl+c, which i use all the time)

i do have to keep telling myself that others are not willing to give some wierd things a go, i try everthing once (typing this on dvorak where i went cold turkey) and not everyone has a heavily modified keyboard layout (all my Fxx buttons are bounde to common funcitons)

(6) well my summer is in december, the current holdup is no one badgering me about it and no one technical to make a point or two and lend a bit of a hand (eg, i know you havent looked at ityet but have you looked at chip yxv for function x)

i have an idea of nearly every chip i need just not which exact chip yet, the only ones really remainng are dedicated chips for the rf radio and misc fetaures.

so the best way to join the project and help out is to annoy me as much as possible on msn or by email (perhaps i sholud set up a mailing list), look at chips that sound like they should do the job (note no electrical experince required, i just need sugestions of chips that sound like they might work) or find me some egineers woh want a PDA they built themselves

ooh and i am looking for software guys or anyone who have some crazy UI ideas or dreams, i have a few bizare ideas for things running in the background to improve the uesr experince (syncing and such)

and if you have read some of my posts and seen the time stamps then you would know your post is mearly "introductionary" in length and my spelling sucks

[Ragnorok]

actually you might want to know there is an actual product called "winbloze", it was an excellent parody of windows and its users about 7 years age if my mem dosent need to be fsck'd ;)

- Funny.  I wonder how long it took the "real" Winbloze to sue them?  (wry grin)

the one advantage of usb ethernet is it can be faster than ethernet, however YMMV

it has USB host so why not stick a gigabit USB2.0 ethernet adaptor in the port ;)
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- As speculatrix mentions, USB isn't faster than gigabit, it's just faster than 100Mb.  Whoopie.  So is Firewire, whose latest incarnation is also faster than the latest USB, just like the first incarnation was.  So why not put Firewire in because it's faster?  But faster isn't the point.

- The point is that Ethernet is the world-wide networking standard.  USB is unfortunately now the standard for peripherals, but it is not routable.  Just because someone's made a do-dad to allow USB to connect to Ethernet and pretend to be routable doesn't mean that solution is desirable.  It just means it works.  If USB were really faster or better for networking in any manner what-so-ever, the world would have migrated to it from Ethernet.   But the world hasn't.  Neither should the Pocket Penguin.

- On a personal note, I don't want to have to carry any more dongles around with me than I have to, or have them hanging off the back of the Z like some goiter.  I would prefer that my pocket Linux workstation be able to natively connect to a real network like a real workstation.  Wifi is not secure enough to be trusted as the only Ethernet-like network connection.  A wire is essential, and USB faking Ethernet is not.

- You mileage may vary, but that's my half-nybble, such as it is.

[Da_Blitz]

all good points however the one that kill it for me is the crazy power usage of gigabit chips and the reqired isolation transformers (bulky)

[charlie]

Much as I love reading about this potential device and I would seriously think about buying one as soon as there is a stable operating system.

I want to know, are we any closer to building one than when this thread started in 7/6 (if you're american 6/7)?

Chas

[Da_Blitz]

i wish i wolud staop hearing about it and had a finished product, the only reason there isnt one is that i have been very easy to distract for about a year now (lots of stuff going on) and it becomes hard to keep motivated about somthnig for this long esp. when there is no input

i will seee what i can do about wiring up the power planes tommorrow, that should be a major win

[Ragnorok]

- I'm not advocating using gigabit.  I'm advocating having an Ethernet port on the Pocket Penguin at whatever speed the battery can handle.  I'd rather have Ethernet at 1Mbit than have to rely solely on USB "networking" at any speed.  I'd be happy to have a PP either way, but I'd prefer if it had Ethernet.

- Everyone has other obligations.  Far as I'm concerned the fervor has died down and now we're into the long slog.  No biggie for me.  I've been in the new house eight months and haven't set up the cross-dev workstation yet.  I bet if someone told you, Da_Blitz, they had an OS ready and needed a development system to start working on it, you'd move along faster.  (shrug)  I don't see that OS manifesting itself, either.  The Pocket Penguin will get done, or it won't, and either way I expect we'll enjoy ourselves, or we wouldn't even consider building it.

[speculatrix]

I agree with Ragnarok. If the hardware exists and is well documented, the programmers will come. The forums are full of clever people who would buy up the heir to the zaurus throne, it just needs to be a worthy contender!

I think even a part working prototype would really get people's appetite going, but so far, sorry to say, we've had a lot of buzz, many ideas for features, but not even a parts manifest or even a prototype PCB on its way.

p.s. I think if you got a part working board with the promise of a free final sample, you'd get one or more of the Angstrom people working on it - they couldn't resist the challenge.

[Da_Blitz]

p.s. I think if you got a part working board with the promise of a free final sample, you'd get one or more of the Angstrom people working on it - they couldn't resist the challenge

you saw right through me, actually i was hoping to get a cut down board out the door first that could connect to a backplane. with just ram on board with the CPU and use the usb bootloader to load the image

would make a nice small cluster for some services i want to run (virtualisation only goes so far)

oh well just need to knuckle down and do it, just keep on bugging me here and on IM

[speculatrix]

p.s. I think if you got a part working board with the promise of a free final sample, you'd get one or more of the Angstrom people working on it - they couldn't resist the challenge

you saw right through me, actually i was hoping to get a cut down board out the door first that could connect to a backplane. with just ram on board with the CPU and use the usb bootloader to load the image

would make a nice small cluster for some services i want to run (virtualisation only goes so far)

oh well just need to knuckle down and do it, just keep on bugging me here and on IM
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absolutely minimal necessary circuit board to get started:
* CPU (it's quite useful)
* RAM
* a boot-strap NOR flash to boot from USB,MMC/SC
* USB slave

almost a necessity:
* on MMC/SD socket
* USB host


I'd guess the keyboard would be a usb device? I've been looking around for a tiny usb keyboard and there's nothing to match the zauruses - they're all either mini laptop sized or thumboards, nothing in the middle.

[Da_Blitz]

keyboard was gioing to use the dedicated keyboard handeling logic with keyscanning and such.

as i said you dont need flash to boot the thing, the device can download a kernerl and initrd into ram over usb client (built in bootloader over USB, no external device required)

nice thing about the freescale chip is that it can boot off of NAND flash, so we only need one chip for teh entire thing and we can use the cheap stuff

[Ragnorok]

connect to a backplane

- What backplane would that be?  PCI slot?  S100?  (grin)  Or something proprietary?  Just curious how this will all shake out ... if it's booting over USB it doesn't seem like it would need much a "backplane", per se.

keyboard was gioing to use the dedicated keyboard handeling logic with keyscanning and such.

- Is this a normal keyboard, or a "custom" scanned keyboard like the Z has?  Or something I'm not thinking of?  Again, just curious how this "bare-bones" system will work.  For instance, if I had one, how would I interface to my wintel (even if that wintel happens to be running linux) boxen to start developing for it?

[speculatrix]

keyboard was gioing to use the dedicated keyboard handeling logic with keyscanning and such.
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wouldn't it be better to keep as many general purpose I/Os free as possible, can be used for bit-bashing serial and parallel ports, I2C, A2D converters...