Universal Linux-based Internet Appliance

This is an interesting one: 3ilinux is working on a sort of generic embeddable Linux box. Basically, they've handled much of the engineering, and they'll help vendors who want to make low cost Embedded Linux routers and what have you's. The hardware is 386 or 486 based, and can have ether, modems, buttons, and LCD displays. And of course it runs Linux from 4MB of flash memory.

Comments

An alternative: L4/Fiasco/Linux

[Animats]

L4/Linux can already do much of this. L4 is a family of message-passing protected-mode microkernels, much like the QNX microkernel. Implementations exist for several machines (x86, Alpha, MIPS, StrongARM). It's possible to run Linux in an L4 process, and this is called L4/Linux. But real-time apps normally run directly on the kernel. It's one of those systems where almost everything is a protected-mode processes, including drivers,file systems, and networking. A very fast IPC mechanism in the kernel makes this feasible.

And it's all open source.

I haven't tried L4, but it's worth a look.

Because for most apps, those OSes are OVERKILL.

[Svartalf]

I will be one of the first to tell someone that those are GREAT OSes for deterministic applications- for most embedded apps, you don't need deterministic operation. That makes using something like OS-9 (which I used years ago as my primary OS (Tandy Color Computer 3...)), QNX, or Lynx major overkill. For these OSes, you'll spend lots of money on something you don't need and won't use- deterministic operation. Linux fills that gap very well (In fact, so well that the Lynx people are extending Linux for light-duty real-time applications and giving it all back to the community- using the support angle and the upgrade path to Lynx for the high-perormance systems angle to make money off of it.)

Re:Where's the source??

[gothic]

The source for the ToolKit can be found here:

http://www.3ilinux.com/uibtoolktsrc.gz

I hope that helps you out. I'd be interested in looking at it, but heck, I don't do C++ . =]

Some pictures

[Money__]

The entire unit (jpg 51k)
With daughter board removed (jpg 59k)
With daughter board flipped over (jpg 61k)

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What about PC104?

[smurd]

Any "Internet Appliance" will probably need A/D, D/A and digital IO to do anything useful. What does the UID buy you other then the drivers for the neat LCD, buttons and the included modem?

PC104 stuff has been around for years and has a good complement of add on cards for IO, ethernet and analog.

check out http://www.pc104.com or (sorry about the name, but they're in the same $300 price range) http://www.winsystems.com

It's not that difficult to roll your own with a boot/root image and loadlin. Most included software will take a floppy image and create a bin file to burn into eprom. If you are willing to do an initial M$DOS boot you don't even need any special drivers or kernels, a standard distribution boot/root/rescue works fine as a starting point.

Re:Why on Earth?

[Gurlia]

Hmm, interesting point. With Linux riding the all the hype and penetrating all kinds of markets, I'm beginning to get the feeling that some people are shoe-horning Linux into where something else might be more appropriate (flameshield on...).

Standard disclaimer: I've nothing against Linux, in fact I use it exclusively and I love it... but... although the nice thing about using Linux for embeddables like this is that you get open standards (rather than locked-down markets that MS would love to have), don't you think this is getting a little out of hand?? I don't believe in one-size-fits-all (as can be seen in MS's case). Sure, Linux is flexible, configurable, and all that, but IMNSHO embeddables would do better to have a system *designed* for the task. Why take a PC OS and shoe-horn it into an embeddable??

Now of course, the flip-side is that using Linux means that these devices will have open standards, which is always a good thing... but the argument still holds: what's preventing us from writing an *open source*, dedicated system designed for this task??

Re:Internet "Appliance"

[Money__]

386/25 laptop with 4 MB of RAM and a 170 GB hard drive

That's gotta be a typo?
I don't think many Linux users are dumb enough to put 170 Gig of storage in a 386/25 box.

Could it be a: 386/25 laptop with 4 MB of RAM and a 170 MB hard drive ??.
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Hooray!

[Gerdts]

I have looked high and low for something like this in the past to deal with a couple problems that I have had to deal with.

The first problem (already solved, very expensively) was to find a way to set up a secure terminal server to access the console of my sun servers. Using a standard terminal server didn't quite meet my needs 'cause I couldn't find one that supported ssh. The best solution that I could find was to get a SCSI terminal server and attach it onto an old sun. This cost me over $1000 and an old sun. If I could have gotten one of these boxes with 16 serial ports, I would have gone with it instead.

The second application that I would use something like this for is a print server. Sure, you can get HP JetDirect cards or standalone print servers from HP, but from my experience they suck pretty bad. Any piece of hardware that makes me walk to it to reboot it more than once per year is begging to be replaced. One of these boxes with a couple parallel ports and an LCD panel to say whose job is being printed to which printer would be awesome.

Re:Why on Earth?

[smurd]

Corporate deadlines.

I had to add SNMP to our rs-232 8 bit 68HC11 based product as soon as possible (2 months max development time including hardware). I wound up using a PC104 linux box with NE2000 add on card.

Development time was 1 week to make linux work out of eprom, 3 weeks to write SNMP client, 3 weeks to make a pretty 1U package.

It's overkill, but total time to market was 4 weeks from customer request to delivery.

Where's the source??

[TurkishGeek]

It's good to see someone had modified the kernel to support the "Disk-on-a-chip", but where's the modified kernel source code then? Where are the patches? I believe a lot of us can have a use for it, there are nice boards on the market using these things, which emulate a hard disk completely, AFAIK.

--

BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.

Re:Why Do They Use FrontPage to make that page ???

[Inoshiro]

why not use and animated gif or better a png instead of a crappy script ?

They do use an animated gif (Opera shows it fine with scripting disabled). Now, PNGs wouldn't allow the animation they wanted, and would likely force some sort of weird javascript solution ;-)

Of course, to have PNG animation, we'll have to wait for browser support of MNG.
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