Interesting new 'Open' Hardware & how do I build shr for it?

[Al Johnson]

On Wednesday 01 December 2010, Gennady Kupava wrote:
> В Пнд, 29/11/2010 в 01:24 -0800, c_c пишет:
> > Hi,
> > 
> >   I was looking at arowboat.org - which is a project at getting Android
> > 
> > working on all TI OMAP series boards and I saw a link to
> > opensourcemid.org. Apparently, Embest (who also make the DevKit 8000 - a
> > beagle board like board) have made a 7" MID with GPS, camera, mini PCIe
> > (they have a WCDMA module), WiFi and bluetooth running on OMAP 3530.
> > 
> >   I ordered a device and I find that :-
> > 
> > 1.  It's built quite well
> > 2.  It's responsive and fast (running android 2.1 as of now)
> > 3.  The hardware schematics are available online
> > 4.  The source code for kernel 2.6.29, x-loader and u-boot are also
> > available online
> > 5.  It has a lot of space between the board and the casing - I'm thinking
> > mods like the Freerunner Navigation board
> > 6.  The company seems responsive enough
> > 
> >   I'm now looking at getting a custom kernel (something newer) running on
> > 
> > it. Also, I was aondering how do I get SHR ported onto such a device? I
> > have the entire openembedded based SHR build system (something I've been
> > using to build stuff for the FreeRunner) with me - but I'm not sure how
> > to go about changing the target system.
> 
> Hi, c_c!
> 
> Thank you for link.
> 
> Specifications ( http://www.armkits.com/product/k7.asp ) are not really
> promising fast speeds: it is only 600Mhz cpu, and 'up to' 256 Mb sdram
> volume is not really good for long term usage. Nothing told about
> graphic card, so i guess CPU managing LCD, that should eat cpu resources
> too. So, only caches size, memory type (unspecified) are different from
> FR.

You'll find a more complete spec at opensourcemid.org. Spec is very similar to 
the beagleboard and n900 - same CPU, same RAM. The CPU has PowerVR SGX530 
onboard so I'd be very surprised if it wasn't available for use as it is on 
the beagleboard, although the accelerated driver is closed. 

> According to same page critical parts are missing from android like
> power management, bluetooth, usb device support, and mic(!) and device
> is mostly oriented to WinCE (notice also .asp in web address), this
> sounds too bad for anyone who want open device, or hackable device with
> linux on board at all.

It may not all be working out of the box, but having the schematics is better 
than most of the alternatives.

> Regards, Gennady.
> 
> 
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