It's already been done - I don't have a URL, but I heard that one was shown at some Korean trade show. Took MMC cards and even managed to work out things like fast forward, etc.
Generally this doesn't work like that - you get a solder stencil and have solder paste (grains of solder in a flux paste) stencilled onto the right bits of the board.
The pick & place then puts the components down, and it goes through a reflow oven where the flux evaporates and the joints solder themselves all at the same time.
It's very sweet to watch:)
It's almost impossible to prototype with through-hole stuff now (on the digital side, at least), they just don't bother making through-hole variants of the chips. Prototyping nowadays is "make a pcb"...
The 9110 is the end-of-the-line as far as that model of phone goes: Nokia have said that future devices are going to use EPOC (32-bit, multitasking, etc) as opposed to GeOS (DOS with twiddles). Ok, this project uses Linux, but I can see why - EPOC is great for getting a lot out of small hardware, but isn't as easy to develop for as Linux.
Possible fun: the PLL multiplier to set the CPU speed in the SA1100 is a software-writable register. SA1100's, as far as I remember, only go down to 133Mhz - 100Mhz is probably simply battery saving on their part. There's a lot of opportunity to write the PPCR register and get some more speed:)
Hugo empeg
Re:mmmm... linux palmtops... yummy
on
New Psion Palmtop
·
· Score: 2
The port for the current psion is less applicable to this box - as it uses a SA1100 instead of the old 7100, the SA1100 port of linux is more what you'd base it on (apart from things like the EPOC bootloader which would most likely stay common).
Several people, including ourselves, have done quite a bit with the SA1100 port. Pity they didn't put the USB slave port on there, especially seeing as you just need to add the connector (USB slave is part of the 1100).
Hugo empeg
Re:Change your country
on
New Cyberlaws
·
· Score: 1
The EU has some silly laws too, but for a country with no intrinsic freedom of speech (the UK) we seem to have more freedom than the states. Hum. What is the world coming to?
This is a hoax: if you've ever used 12c508/9's you'll know a few things.
1. No UART. You have to do it yourself in software. He's using the internal RC oscilliator which does NOT give enough tolerance to run at 115,200bps which he claims it does.
2. A software UART which will give byte in/byte out will take around 100 instructions. Oh, and you can't receive any data whilst you're processing other stuff, which makes it hard with bytes end to end - remembering also that 115,200bps is a bit every 10us or so, and that a 4Mhz 12c509 only manages 1 instruction per us.
3. The RAM is patently too small to do *any* of this. You have something like 20 bytes of RAM on the PIC, even the default ICMP ping packet is around 56 bytes of payload, not taking into account the IP or ICMP headers. You need to copy the ping packet's data portion byte-for-byte when you do a ping reply - how are you going to do this when you can't even hold a single packet in RAM?
etc etc etc. It's a hoax. You couldn't even get a RFC-compliant IP (let alone TCP/IP) stack on a 16f84, and this is a LOT bigger/faster. People have got limited TCP/IP functionality on 6502's (in 32k RAM) - but not host RFC compliant, just enough to do Telnet.
Interesting. Red bull only lists the caffeine amount as a percentage on the ingredients list: it has 0.03% caffeine, which turns out to be 75mg on the 250ml cans. Other 'active' ingredients include Taurine (1000mg/250ml) and Glucuronolactone (600mg/250ml).
The amounts vary from country to country according to local regulations. Sounds an awful lot like pushing it to the legal maximums without becoming a prescription drug to me;)
This seems to be pretty rare in the US - I couldn't find it in San Jose or San Diego this year - but it's the UK Clubland drink of choice, mixed with Vodka. Basically, it has (from http://www.red-bull.com ) :
* Taurin and glucuronolacton (natural and body-own agents, which serve as metabolism transmitters) * caffeine * b-complex vitamins * carbon hydrates (carbohydrates?;) )
This stuff is serious. I've had Jolt (bit hard to get in the UK) and Jolt has *nothing* on Red Bull. Two red bulls will get you 24 hour uptime with no concentration loss (drink when tired: repeat as necessary. Kicks in in ~15 minutes). I keep a can in the car in case I start to fall asleep on long drives.
With alcohol you get to be wide awake and drunk. Have too many (5 in one night) and from personal experience I got to be sick on a bouncer (and then got thrown out of the club, not suprisingly), went home with someone I really should have avoided, and then couldn't sleep for the whole night (no, it wasn't the girl... I desparately needed sleep at that point).
This and Pepsi Max (no more caffeine than normal cola as far as I know, but a nice taste) are the official drinks of the empeg, and they're always in my fridge;)
Yes, unix happened at the start of the 70s, a bit before(?) VMS: this doesn't mean the underlying principles are wrong. The fact that NT boxes don't deal well with high load is very worrying - VMS boxes do. UNIX is up against a bad VMS implementation in NT.
The problem also is that UNIX is happy with lower resources - it *can* be stripped down (well, we use it in our car radio;) ). NT is just HUGE - it tries to be everything to everyone. UNIX realises it's not for everyone, and ends up doing what it does very well.
I don't see NT being crushed by UNIX. Then again, I don't see UNIX being crushed by NT either - as far as I'm concerned, I'm sure they'll both carry on for at least another 10 years: maybe NT might even be stable by then.
The USB on the unit is a USB slave - much more simple than a USB host like a PC has (hosts can only talk to slaves, so it needed to be this way around). The code is in our kernel patch - we've just patched up to 2.2.9 - it should hit the SA-1100 patchset pretty soon.
We've not played with the new USB host support in linux yet, but it looks much simpler than the old UUSB stack.
Yes, it's been a long time: yes, we did think we could get it done sooner than we have - but we didn't try to mislead anyone, and have always been responsive (usually 24 hours, maybe more when we get./'ed) to email.
We've not even done the official launch yet; we don't believe in vapourware and we have never wanted to promise stuff which just wasn't going to happen and the disappoint a lot of people.
To come clean: we're really not marketing types. We're geeks, and we love making cool toys. We don't have a smooth-talking PR department and are pretty much stretched to the limit at the moment (we've got some more people starting work for us soon though, which should help a lot!).
Sorry if you felt let-down, hopefully you'll still love the product when you see one and fall in love again:)
Hugo empeg
Re:...but can you telnet?
on
Empeg Shipping
·
· Score: 1
The base install (player diskimage) doesn't run debian - it's just our player, our own/sbin/init, and glibc-2.1.
The developer install (developer diskimage) has the usual bash, gzip, rz, sz, tar, etc and boots to a bash# prompt.
You can switch between images anytime you feel like it, and you have a 32mb partition to do with as you please. You can install & run PPP on the serial or irda if you want, and run inetd/in.telnetd for access to the unit.
Hugo empeg
Re:damn. Thought the stats were better
on
Empeg Shipping
·
· Score: 1
Erm. I crashed my CRX with one of the prototype empegs running in the dash.
Ok, ok, so it was only maybe 5mph (new bonnet, new bumper, new lights), but I wasn't really out to prove the shock tolerance at the cost of my insurance bonus;)
Hugo empeg
Re:A plea to the EMPEG folks
on
Empeg Shipping
·
· Score: 1
I did promise one to./ at linuxexpo, but I think CmdrTaco is fighting to have it;) (I've got a pic of him kissing one of the prototypes...)
You never know, we *do* love slashdot here:)
Hugo empeg
Re:here's the pricelist [/. effect claims another]
on
Empeg Shipping
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but your PC won't be as small, cute, and definitely (at that price) won't be using laptop drives to make the 28Gb storage. Laptop drives, especially top-end ones, are NOT cheap - remember, they usually go in $4000 laptops, like the high-end thinkpads.
You need 2.5" drives in a mobile platform: 3.5" drives are designed with one parameter in mind: cost. The price competition is cutthroat. 2.5" drives are designed with a different parameter: ruggedness. Transfer speed & price are secondary in the mobile market.
My take on this would be "He cares, but not *that* much". He's sold the company, not his soul - yes, there may be anti-competitive clauses about him not leaving and writing any other MP3 players for a bit, but he's still free to persue a life of religious fulfillment (or whatever), and he's also a considerable amount richer than before. I'd be happy:)
This happened at Lancaster Uni in the UK when my friend was there: a group of engineers took a mini apart, took all the bits up in the lift to the top of an accomodation block, and rebuilt it up there - including the engine. A complete drivable car on top of a (something like) 12 story block.
It stayed there for a couple of years until the university rented a crane to get it down (ignoring the more fun option of a brick on the accellerator and a clear area below).
The reason? A walkman-style CD-based MP3 player would require (rough guess) around $1,000,000 upfront investment to get it to market. Reason? You need (a) a small CD-ROM mechanism - eg, like the laptop/iMac ones, with low power consumption and small size, and (b) huge wadges of cash for plastic moulding.
This means that when one comes out, it'll be from a big company. Our empeg player sidesteps most of this as it's an in-car unit, so you can get away with CNC punched metalwork and just some custom acrylic (with embedded mesh for EMC shielding) - but just the development bill for this is well into 6 figures.
The reason why hardware usually comes from big companies is that the up-front investment is HUGE: getting it into production is a NIGHTMARE - we practically have one person full-time just running around sorting out component sourcing, build issues, etc - and this is with a contract manufacturer actually doing the manufacturing. It's *not* something you can do on a shoestring: even FCC testing is well over $1000/day, and that's a legal necessity (and, if you fail you'll have to make a new prototype to production standard, at a cost of maybe $3000 and try again at $1000/day). If they're making hardware, they can afford a better website than that. I'm not saying ours is great, but at least you get the idea the product *exists*:)
I wish these people luck, but I'm pretty skeptical that they can sell a product for less than Diamond with more cute bits. The Creative Nomad, which is basically the Samsung Yepp, is *made by the people who actually make the Flash chips* - you don't get much better pricing on storage than that...
The pilot doesn't have the CPU power for a MP3 player: not by a *long* way. No idea what the audio output circuitry is, but I'm pretty sure it's not 44.1khz stereo...
Some WinCE boxes can manage it: they have bigger CPUs simply because WinCE isn't exactly lightweight:)
...actually, 8M. There are pads on the underside of the PCB for expansion to 16, but no SIMM socket (vibration isn't good, and it's 3.3v but NOT SDRAM, which makes simms...rare). Come on, you're not running X:) (at least, I hope you're not) and you can always have some swap.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already been done - I don't have a URL, but I heard that one was shown at some Korean trade show. Took MMC cards and even managed to work out things like fast forward, etc.
Hugo
Generally this doesn't work like that - you get a solder stencil and have solder paste (grains of solder in a flux paste) stencilled onto the right bits of the board.
:)
The pick & place then puts the components down, and it goes through a reflow oven where the flux evaporates and the joints solder themselves all at the same time.
It's very sweet to watch
It's almost impossible to prototype with through-hole stuff now (on the digital side, at least), they just don't bother making through-hole variants of the chips. Prototyping nowadays is "make a pcb"...
Hugo
My ANTterm program on the Acorn did URL launching from a terminal window years ago...
Still, it's a good feature.
Hugo
The 9110 is the end-of-the-line as far as that model of phone goes: Nokia have said that future devices are going to use EPOC (32-bit, multitasking, etc) as opposed to GeOS (DOS with twiddles). Ok, this project uses Linux, but I can see why - EPOC is great for getting a lot out of small hardware, but isn't as easy to develop for as Linux.
Hugo
(a longtime 9000i user)
Very suprising seeing the SA1100 has USB slave: just add EMC-compliance common-mode chokes, etc and connector - the whole USB transceiver is on-chip.
Hmmm. Frightened of the software implications perhaps? Older SA1100s did have problematic USB, hence why the empeg has to use an external USB chip.
Hugo
Possible fun: the PLL multiplier to set the CPU speed in the SA1100 is a software-writable register. SA1100's, as far as I remember, only go down to 133Mhz - 100Mhz is probably simply battery saving on their part. There's a lot of opportunity to write the PPCR register and get some more speed :)
Hugo
empeg
The port for the current psion is less applicable to this box - as it uses a SA1100 instead of the old 7100, the SA1100 port of linux is more what you'd base it on (apart from things like the EPOC bootloader which would most likely stay common).
Several people, including ourselves, have done quite a bit with the SA1100 port. Pity they didn't put the USB slave port on there, especially seeing as you just need to add the connector (USB slave is part of the 1100).
Hugo
empeg
The EU has some silly laws too, but for a country with no intrinsic freedom of speech (the UK) we seem to have more freedom than the states. Hum. What is the world coming to?
Hugo
This is a hoax: if you've ever used 12c508/9's you'll know a few things.
1. No UART. You have to do it yourself in software. He's using the internal RC oscilliator which does NOT give enough tolerance to run at 115,200bps which he claims it does.
2. A software UART which will give byte in/byte out will take around 100 instructions. Oh, and you can't receive any data whilst you're processing other stuff, which makes it hard with bytes end to end - remembering also that 115,200bps is a bit every 10us or so, and that a 4Mhz 12c509 only manages 1 instruction per us.
3. The RAM is patently too small to do *any* of this. You have something like 20 bytes of RAM on the PIC, even the default ICMP ping packet is around 56 bytes of payload, not taking into account the IP or ICMP headers. You need to copy the ping packet's data portion byte-for-byte when you do a ping reply - how are you going to do this when you can't even hold a single packet in RAM?
etc etc etc. It's a hoax. You couldn't even get a RFC-compliant IP (let alone TCP/IP) stack on a 16f84, and this is a LOT bigger/faster. People have got limited TCP/IP functionality on 6502's (in 32k RAM) - but not host RFC compliant, just enough to do Telnet.
Hugo
Interesting. Red bull only lists the caffeine amount as a percentage on the ingredients list: it has 0.03% caffeine, which turns out to be 75mg on the 250ml cans. Other 'active' ingredients include Taurine (1000mg/250ml) and Glucuronolactone (600mg/250ml).
;)
The amounts vary from country to country according to local regulations. Sounds an awful lot like pushing it to the legal maximums without becoming a prescription drug to me
Hugo
This seems to be pretty rare in the US - I couldn't find it in San Jose or San Diego this year - but it's the UK Clubland drink of choice, mixed with Vodka. Basically, it has (from http://www.red-bull.com ) :
;) )
;)
* Taurin and glucuronolacton (natural and body-own agents, which serve as metabolism transmitters)
* caffeine
* b-complex vitamins
* carbon hydrates (carbohydrates?
This stuff is serious. I've had Jolt (bit hard to get in the UK) and Jolt has *nothing* on Red Bull. Two red bulls will get you 24 hour uptime with no concentration loss (drink when tired: repeat as necessary. Kicks in in ~15 minutes). I keep a can in the car in case I start to fall asleep on long drives.
With alcohol you get to be wide awake and drunk. Have too many (5 in one night) and from personal experience I got to be sick on a bouncer (and then got thrown out of the club, not suprisingly), went home with someone I really should have avoided, and then couldn't sleep for the whole night (no, it wasn't the girl... I desparately needed sleep at that point).
This and Pepsi Max (no more caffeine than normal cola as far as I know, but a nice taste) are the official drinks of the empeg, and they're always in my fridge
Hugo
Yes, unix happened at the start of the 70s, a bit before(?) VMS: this doesn't mean the underlying principles are wrong. The fact that NT boxes don't deal well with high load is very worrying - VMS boxes do. UNIX is up against a bad VMS implementation in NT.
;) ). NT is just HUGE - it tries to be everything to everyone. UNIX realises it's not for everyone, and ends up doing what it does very well.
The problem also is that UNIX is happy with lower resources - it *can* be stripped down (well, we use it in our car radio
I don't see NT being crushed by UNIX. Then again, I don't see UNIX being crushed by NT either - as far as I'm concerned, I'm sure they'll both carry on for at least another 10 years: maybe NT might even be stable by then.
Hugo
The USB on the unit is a USB slave - much more simple than a USB host like a PC has (hosts can only talk to slaves, so it needed to be this way around). The code is in our kernel patch - we've just patched up to 2.2.9 - it should hit the SA-1100 patchset pretty soon.
We've not played with the new USB host support in linux yet, but it looks much simpler than the old UUSB stack.
Hugo
Yes, it's been a long time: yes, we did think we could get it done sooner than we have - but we didn't try to mislead anyone, and have always been responsive (usually 24 hours, maybe more when we get ./'ed) to email.
:)
We've not even done the official launch yet; we don't believe in vapourware and we have never wanted to promise stuff which just wasn't going to happen and the disappoint a lot of people.
To come clean: we're really not marketing types. We're geeks, and we love making cool toys. We don't have a smooth-talking PR department and are pretty much stretched to the limit at the moment (we've got some more people starting work for us soon though, which should help a lot!).
Sorry if you felt let-down, hopefully you'll still love the product when you see one and fall in love again
Hugo
empeg
The base install (player diskimage) doesn't run debian - it's just our player, our own /sbin/init, and glibc-2.1.
The developer install (developer diskimage) has the usual bash, gzip, rz, sz, tar, etc and boots to a bash# prompt.
You can switch between images anytime you feel like it, and you have a 32mb partition to do with as you please. You can install & run PPP on the serial or irda if you want, and run inetd/in.telnetd for access to the unit.
Hugo
empeg
Erm. I crashed my CRX with one of the prototype empegs running in the dash.
;)
Ok, ok, so it was only maybe 5mph (new bonnet, new bumper, new lights), but I wasn't really out to prove the shock tolerance at the cost of my insurance bonus
Hugo
empeg
I did promise one to ./ at linuxexpo, but I think CmdrTaco is fighting to have it ;) (I've got a pic of him kissing one of the prototypes...)
:)
You never know, we *do* love slashdot here
Hugo
empeg
Yes, but your PC won't be as small, cute, and definitely (at that price) won't be using laptop drives to make the 28Gb storage. Laptop drives, especially top-end ones, are NOT cheap - remember, they usually go in $4000 laptops, like the high-end thinkpads.
You need 2.5" drives in a mobile platform: 3.5" drives are designed with one parameter in mind: cost. The price competition is cutthroat. 2.5" drives are designed with a different parameter: ruggedness. Transfer speed & price are secondary in the mobile market.
Hugo
empeg
My take on this would be "He cares, but not *that* much". He's sold the company, not his soul - yes, there may be anti-competitive clauses about him not leaving and writing any other MP3 players for a bit, but he's still free to persue a life of religious fulfillment (or whatever), and he's also a considerable amount richer than before. I'd be happy :)
This happened at Lancaster Uni in the UK when my friend was there: a group of engineers took a mini apart, took all the bits up in the lift to the top of an accomodation block, and rebuilt it up there - including the engine. A complete drivable car on top of a (something like) 12 story block.
It stayed there for a couple of years until the university rented a crane to get it down (ignoring the more fun option of a brick on the accellerator and a clear area below).
The reason? A walkman-style CD-based MP3 player would require (rough guess) around $1,000,000 upfront investment to get it to market. Reason? You need (a) a small CD-ROM mechanism - eg, like the laptop/iMac ones, with low power consumption and small size, and (b) huge wadges of cash for plastic moulding.
:)
This means that when one comes out, it'll be from a big company. Our empeg player sidesteps most of this as it's an in-car unit, so you can get away with CNC punched metalwork and just some custom acrylic (with embedded mesh for EMC shielding) - but just the development bill for this is well into 6 figures.
The reason why hardware usually comes from big companies is that the up-front investment is HUGE: getting it into production is a NIGHTMARE - we practically have one person full-time just running around sorting out component sourcing, build issues, etc - and this is with a contract manufacturer actually doing the manufacturing. It's *not* something you can do on a shoestring: even FCC testing is well over $1000/day, and that's a legal necessity (and, if you fail you'll have to make a new prototype to production standard, at a cost of maybe $3000 and try again at $1000/day). If they're making hardware, they can afford a better website than that. I'm not saying ours is great, but at least you get the idea the product *exists*
I wish these people luck, but I'm pretty skeptical that they can sell a product for less than Diamond with more cute bits. The Creative Nomad, which is basically the Samsung Yepp, is *made by the people who actually make the Flash chips* - you don't get much better pricing on storage than that...
Hugo
empeg
The pilot doesn't have the CPU power for a MP3 player: not by a *long* way. No idea what the audio output circuitry is, but I'm pretty sure it's not 44.1khz stereo...
:)
Some WinCE boxes can manage it: they have bigger CPUs simply because WinCE isn't exactly lightweight
Ok, I'm cynical: I don't think they can do it for the price. Also, the page hasn't changed for almost 6 months...
Hugo
Hugo, empeg
Hugo, empeg