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Build Your Own StrongARM Linux Computer
krp writes: "From the LART FAQ page: 'The LART is a small yet powerful embedded computer capable of running Linux. Its performance is around 250 MIPS while consuming less than 1 Watt of power. In a standard configuration it holds 32MB DRAM and 4MB Flash ROM, which is sufficient for a Linux kernel and a sizeable ramdisk image.' Full schematics and CAD files for the main board, kitchen sink board, the boot loader (BLOB) and patches for the Linux kernel are available for download as well as various software tools. This tiny machine could be ideal for embedded / portable / wearable applications -- there are some pictures (including a LART running off a small battery!) in l'ART gallery. "
seriously though, doesn't smaller form factor make it easier and more attractive to built clusters?
There's another, perhaps more accessible ARM based Unix computer out there for experimenters.
It's call the Chalice CATS, a ATX-form factor board, with a StrongARM processor (at 233 MHz,
IIRC), and most of the other features of a relatively modern PC (3 PCI/4 ISA, parallel,
serial, USB ports, SDRAM DIMM memory, UDMA/33 IDE port).
It ships with NetBSD, but if there has been some porting effort for Linux.
Have a look-see:
www.chaltech.com/products.html
The LART is designed as an embedded system. i.e. *small*
I'm involved somewhat with a videoconferencing research project here. There's been talk of wireless, and we looked at the Itsy, but its license is EVIL. This thing is nearly perfect!
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It would be a cool thing if there was a Linux port to the Jornada, unfortunately, the references I can find on the LinuxCE mailing lists are not terribly specific/useful.
What's really unfortunate is that there has been no progression of the StrongARM series over the last couple years. It came out as a slick, low power, 250MHz CPU. That's still what it is, despite two years of surrounding technical advances. Transmeta Crusoe is becoming a available for similar applications, and may provide an even better mix of computational power and "battery efficiency."
Of course, the funny thing is that Elinux.com sells the Journada 690 as a Linux-compatible product!
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Netbooting is important why? I doubt there is any need to do anything like that because hardware dosn't cost your firstborn anymore
Even if hardware was free, netbooting would still be important. It turns out that if you run a lab of say, 50 computers of the same spec, Netbooting is great. The reason being you can change/alter the OS and all computers will change. You have just saved some serious time.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Netbooting is still important. If I want a quiet machine hooked to my stereo to play MP3s netbooting would let me avoid a hard drive (assuming I fetch the MP3s over the net, which is more then fast enough). Using a StrongARM, or other low power CPU would let me avoid the need for a CPU fan as well, so no moving noisy parts at all.
Netbooting is also useful if you are bringing up a new system. To be useful the new system will need networking (even if only to get new boot images). A netbooted system won't need the disk drivers to work right away. Or the console drivers. Or anything but the ethernet (or a serial driver and PPP...).
Netbooting is useful for field upgrades as well. Simpler then getting a floppy or CD in the machine if it isn't anywhere near you (or other people!). I have lots of computers I do work on that are nowhere near me (some 30 miles away, some 3000). Many of them are in unmaned locations.
Netbooting is useful as a last resort on a machine that has blown it's drive and is nowhere near people that can fix it, at least if the image can be re-written, or if the system can really be used diskless (like it has blown a boot but not data disk, or is doing CPU bound tasks like playing part of a render farm). To be honest I havn't had this happen in the last 10 years. But it could happen.
Lastly, look at the i-opener. Sure it has 16M of FLASH, but you don't want to write that very offen. Unless you cram a hard drive into it you'll alsmot certonally use the 16M of FLASH as a glorifyed bootloader, NFS mounting the bulk of your system. Possabbably even /. Sure you could use a USB Zip (or Orb) drive, but that'll be as slow as NFS over USB ethernet anyway (well caching works somewhat better, unless you use NQNFS, or CODA, or RVD, but still...).
So while netbooting isn't as useful as it was thought to be 10 years ago (and to be honest it was overhyped then!), it is really really valuable in some situations.
This is a bit off topic, but I've got a Corel Netwinder and I was wondering how to install a new distribution. It's got RedHat 4.2 right now and I want to install Debian 2.2 instead. Problem is, it does not have a cd-rom or floppy, so the only way you can boot it is off the internal HD. That makes the installation kinda difficult...
Any ideas?
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
This sounded like something really cool to get, if for no other reason then to have it.
But, they don't sell them =( Maybe someone will pick up the ball and make them?
Speaking of LART and it's original Usenrt meaning, I wonder if it is possible to put a LART function in the slashcode (SlashLART??), and cut down on the Hot Grits and Naked and petrified posts? But then again it would probably just be abused, as I just had moderator access and spent all my points moderating up posts that were moderated down by people with no sense of humor. *Sigh*
You say you want a revolution....
Well, I could see you making a LART into a LART...you'd just need to add a sturdy aluminum case (spikes optional) and a carrying lanyard that would double as a morningstar-style thingie to swing it around your head with...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Forget zip disks. They draw way to much power and are way to delicate. Use Compactflash cards. You can jumper them and they behave just like an IDE HD so you can connect them to the IDE interface on the doughter board. You can get them up to 192 Mbytes now. No moving parts to wear out. No heads to crash. Dust has no effect on them. They may cost more per MB, but they are so much more robust and draw so much less power.
As for adding a pair of DACs. It shouldn't be all that hard. I'd recomend looking at using a FPGA to implement DMA transfer and addressing for the DACs. They could be put on their own card along with a headphone amplifyer circuit.
Yah, if you were able to buy one, you could put your time in just designing the perfect form factor for it. TNG-style tricorder, anyone? :-)
iSKUNK!
Check out the Psion Series 7 or Netbook (The Netbook is, AFAIK, pretty much just a slightly faster Series 7 with a customisable Flash Card ROM for the OS and business-specific apps instead of the standard EPOC32 applications ROM.)
Netbook: 190MHz StrongARM with 32/64MByte RAM...
Series 7: 133 MHz StrongARM with 16/32 MByte RAM..
Personally, I have a Series 5 mx, that's a 16-greyscale model with a 36MHz ARM chip and 16Mbyte RAM. Runs off two AA batteries (and, with my usage patterns, these last weeks.)
Choice of masters is not freedom.
..an easy way to make an embedded-ish system is with Boot ROM's on your ethernet card! NFS your root FS, get your kernel over the network.
Read up on the Linux Terminal Server Project. It's good stuff.
And here I thought a LART was a Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool. Doh!
Skippy
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
It might be possible to *run* Quake on a StrongArm, but I don't think you'd actually want to *play* it. If I'm remembering correctly, the StrongArm has no floating point unit. All floating poing calculations are done in software. Probably not going to get a very high frame rate on something like that. :^)
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"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
I'm running a P133 as just such a machine now. Originally it had a hard disk in it but I copied everything from it (cp -avx :) to an nfs server and made an nfsroot boot disk (linux/Documentation/nfsroot.txt has all the info you'll need on this).
It loads LILO and the kernel from floppy, but after that there's no moving parts (the P133 doesn't need a cpu fan, only a large sink, and I've ripped out the power supply fan). I suppose I could write a PROM chips that loads the kernel via TFTP or something (etherboot would do this), but I don't have any of the equipment to do that yet.
BTW, packard bell desktop machines can actually look pretty cool if you take all the plastic off, paint the metal casing jet black, and screw a carefully sized (black painted) metal sheet to the front. Maybe not as cool as jet-black painted Mac SE/30's running Debian, but close :)
Goodness what an uncivil bunch of replies you have recieved.
You should check out the debian-arm mailing list over at www.debian.org. You will find several posts from me describing various versions of the Debian installation code for the potato release on Netwinders. It works quite well. Feel free to email me with specific questions, I'm sure you can figure out my e-mail address from my user record.
If Linux powers LARTs, does FreeBSD power FARTs?
Y.
What do you think the empeg.com box is?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Yopy. For sale in a little over two months.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I had to build an embedded system about three years back. Our only constaints were 3" by 4", components on 1 side only, and very low power. The low power contraint killed everyone but the StrongArm. At 200MHz it didn't need a heatsink and didn't even get warm to the touch. It's core runs at 1.5 volts. It's very easy to hook peripherals up. It has serial ports (and I think USB), general purpose I/O ports, LCD port, and could take either static or dynamic ram. You had to load 3 or so registers to configure the memory waitstates, etc.
.05" pitch apart. I was able to do it, but it's very hard and we had a $3000 solder station. Hint: you can't help but put too much solder on and bridge pins. Just heat them all up with the iron and suck off the excess with solder wick. Use lots of flux too.
I had been dreaming of building a new Linux-based version myself, but never had the time. For those of you thinking about building your own, think again. The StrongArm's pins are
Oh, debugging the thing is a bitch. It has a nice JTAG port, but sometimes you just have to use a logic analyzer. haahahaha - with a cache, out-of-sequence execution, and jump instructions embedded in the machine code, it's a nightmare. Luckily the thing is so easy to configure you shouldn't have to resort to that too much. Pray you don't.
Now I write Java code. Sigh - I want to build hardware again...
-tim
If I'm not mistaken, the cpu only uses less then 1/4 of the power of the computer. Most of it is used by the screen, and a good chunk by the hard drives/cdroms.
So, a less power hungery cpu will help, but not as much as you seem to think..
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
What is a standard desktop computer? That's one question, but actually I have planned to design this kind of desktop computer for some time now. I haven't yet started to do any actual desing work but I have thinked about it while doing some work with embedded systems.
One of the main questions is how much computation power average desktop computer user really needs? Due the fact, these processors lack on power compared on common processors used in today's desktops, but how much is really needed for running applications needed in every day use of the desktop computer?
Ofcource this isn't only question that remains (there is at leas issue about the availability of these processors for prototyping), but if computation power need can be satisfied by some processor like this (ARM), I can't see reason why not to implement one.
I submitted a story to Slashdot yesterday (declined) about Sony's announcement of peripherals tacked on to the end of Memory Sticks like thin Pez heads. On TV in Tokyo they showed last night a teeny little GPS antenna the size of your pinky fingernail, clock, ccd camera, and microphone, all in the same form factor. Apparently this Memory Stick Duo series is going to provide a common serial interface across widely different consumer items, from an Aibo to a camera, to headphones, to your wristwatch, they said. Maybe a firewire or infrared connection will make networking easier..
Quite so. It's not too bad - I've played Quake through a couple of times on the Acorn Risc PC, which uses a similarly specced StrongARM, and it's playable, as long as resolution is kept fairly low. Quake II, III is out of the question.
There are ARM designs with FP, though...
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This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
One of my main problems and ideas that I have with processors like these that seem to be largely geared to "low power" systems and that are "cheap" (these are both relative words) never seem to make it into standard desktop computers, Crusoe and this are both working on "embedded systems " and "portable devices". Why hasn't anyone created a real sit down and run linux computer with one of these? Is there any problem with actually doing this? Maybe I just dont' get it. If it's cheap, and if' it's more efficient then why don't they have them in computers that average people would be using?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
OK, lets see if I understand this correctly. Discussing Netwinder, which uses Linux and StrongARM, on a message board about Linux and StrongARM is offtopic, but threats of torture and rape are welcome and appropriate. Of course! Why didn't I think of that??
With so much garbage like this showing up on Slashdot, I am surprised that Rob doesn't resort to censorship. I sure as hell would. If I had my way, your post would be deleted and your IP would be permanently banned.
All the guy did was ask a fucking question. While in the strictest sense, it was offtopic, it was no more offtopic that 85% of what appears on Slashdot. I thought it was interesting, and wanted to see what people had to say about it. I certainly didn't want to read about raping small children while they scream in pain.
It is comforting to know that your mother probably came in 15 minutes after you posted and made you shut off your computer and go to bed, because tomorrow's a school day.
Rot in hell,
Steve
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Stephen C. VanDahm
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
I'm not all that sure if this would help, for any given embedded application the chances are much customization will need to be done including writing kernel code to drive any custom hardware included and to strip out everything that is not needed.
With it's cut down kernel and OS in silicon it probably boots into linux quicker than my PII.
I found this to be really impressive, with bulk purchasing the potential cost of this type of circuit is very low. I'm really hoping that hack's like this will show the potential for cheap processors like the strongArm and open source software like Linux to be a serious contentedness for embedded applications where a little more beef is required.
I'm seriously considering having a crack at building one of these although I haven't done a whole lot of surface mount soldering, perhaps someone will start selling these babys.
How hard would it be to grab one of these bad-boys, add a couple of DACs, and then connect it to a zip drive (via rs232?)... PLaying Mp3s in a portable manner using Zip disks is my life long ambition :)
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
MP3, Quake, LCD are ALL planned for the LART future. Here at the university we have permission to build the ultimate Linux wearable and get paid with a Ph.D. for it.
Within 1 month we hope to have MP3s playing to the speakers. We estimate that with advanced techniques such as voltage scaling (I wrote the driver and will release it soon) the power consumption will be about 300 mW. With some good bateries you will get a few hours of music out of a LART.
Quake is a different story, as said 3D stuff is heavy on the processor, but more importantly a good color LCD is very expernsive in terms of power. We have a 6 W color LCD...
We estimate that a single LART can be equiped with a wireless link of 5 Mbps using advanced stuff like OFDM software radio. We are building a radio frontend for it now.
If you want to build your own LART, read the mailinglist. Building is possible, but getting the parts is next to impossible.
Just my 5 eurocents, Johan.
I sure they were manufacturing these themselves and selling them. I'd buy one.
What I'd like even more, is a StrongArm based notebook. I mean, when people get so excited about the Transmeta chip, not for it's code morphing, but for it's ultra-low power features. I got excited about it too -- I'd love to have a laptop which ran for 8 hours+. But why doesn't someone make a StrongArm based notebook? I mean, it consumes even less power -- and it could probably go for even longer than 8 hours.
You could run Linux on it. X, GNOME/KDE, the whole bag -- all in a package which is cheaper and more energy effecient than a conventional x86 laptop, and even a Transmeta-based notebook.
Even better, Intel just demoed (I think) 1 GHz StrongArm chips. How incredible would one of those in a notebook be? Wouldn't be as fast as a 1GHz Athlon/PIII, but it'd sure be fast, and with phenomonal battery life.
Please, someone make a StrongArm based notebook!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
HP has made one already. It's the Jornada 820. It has a "High-performance 32-bit StrongArm RISC CPU running at 190MHz".
Have a look at it here.
You mean like one of these? It's a little underpowered, but they claim 15 hours of battery life.
After looking at the gerber files, I would highly doubt that this is a project for the average, or above average do it yourselfer. It isnt easy to get a *6* layer prototype Printed Circuit board fabbed economically. Until someone out there comes out with a variant of this project with a 2-4 layer board, its out of our reach.....
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
The phone lines are 30dB noisier too. And you don't want to get me started on NTSC!
Not to mention that the very first RISC microcomputer, the Acorn Archimedes, was British - the StrongARM evolved from that CPU, and indeed I seem to remember you guys were using 286s or Mac Classics at the time.
Meanwhile, I'll take the comparison to Asian products as a national compliment, since Japanese consumer goods are far superior to anything else on the planet.
Earth, that is ... do you know it?
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
That reminds me of this onHand PDA thing I saw, incase some of you don't know, it is a small device that fits on your wrist as a watch, and it is a PDA, now with this...one running Linux could be great, the onHand runs on Windows CE i believe. No matter what the OS though, a watch computer seems too cool, so I think I'm going to definitely pick one up.
They run for $299 check it out here onhandpc.com
"spare the lachrymosity when the fulminations have inveighed"
-madd