The ECB_AT91 is a new Colombian SBC with a 180 MHz ARM9 processor that runs Linux. It supports up to 64MBytes of SDRAM, has a SD/MMC slot, a 10/100 Ethernet port and an USB 2.0 interface. It was inspired by Darrell Harmon‘s and Flavio Ribeiro‘s SBCs. Debian runs on this board without problems. More information and pictures can be found at the ECB_AT91 website.
I’d love something like this at home for use as a little web server. Really, the thing is portable enough to where I’d like to leave an AC jack for it everywhere I frequent- work, home office, closet at home, etc.- and just hook it up wherever need be.
How much does something like this cost? And is there something like this available with a VGA / DVI port?
I guess, these things would get interesting if they would cost about 50 tot 75 euro’s.
Then I might consider buying one of them. Might be fun to make a small networed media thingy out of it. In the meanwhile, you’re better of with something like a squeezebox.
And it is like this with most of the stuff that you would use this thing for. For the same price, or less, you can buy something that already works, and has a nice finnish.
But hey, it’s not as much fun I guess
This will be a sub-200USD card.
I have a small web server for my subversion repository.
http://arhuaco.ath.cx/
http://arhuaco.ath.cx/svn/src/
It’s a Gumstix (http://www.gumstix.com/) . I hope to have a ECB_AT91 soon.
Disclaimer : I’m a friend of Carlos, the ECB_AT91 developer. I might be biased, but I really like this board.
I’ve been wanting to get into embedded Linux development for quite a while now. I’ve been looking for something like this, since I could presumably fix it, no matter how bad I break it, via the JTAG port.
I managed to kill a wireless router I bought for the purpose the first time I booted it, but I can’t recover the flash memory, since it has no JTAG port.
So if these ever go up for sale, I’ll definitely buy one.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6698241512.html
There is more information in LinuxDevices.
Hmmm. I’m imagining a small compile farm composed of those…
Then you think realisticly..
Realistically, a cheap Sempron64 system would be so much more efficient that a pile of SBCs. The price you’d pay for a Sempron and 512MB of RAM would be *much* less that a comparable compile farm of these SBCs.
Now, the ‘awesomeness’ factor would be intangible and priceless.
As a matter of fact, I’m lobbying the wife to let me build a wamperdyne AMD64 system for Christmas. But I still want to do a modest compile farm project, just for the experience. Gotta keep Gentoo emerged, you know.
I can see myself hiding in my basement a couple of years from now, smiling as the sounds of the ever dropping FAIR&TRUSTED bombs up on the surface reenforces the baseline of some good ol’ obscure death metal MP3 track molesting the speakers connected to the little machine before me. I have just managed to get hold of a circulating floppy disk (the internet being dead due to some anti-terror law and the corpse rapidly consumed by vultures) at my local entomology group (also an underground LUG, of sorts) with a patched vesa driver and a kernel hack that can make the board take 128MB SDRAM (actually 256MB if you have a certain revision of some old Viking RAM) and watched the first episode of South Park in a tiny stuttering window. Then I put my pipe out, put everything back into my secret “Colombia box”, go upstairs and have the kids beat the crap out of me in Oblivious on the ZBox and film myself a little with iSeeYou. Still smiling.
There is something about these tiny computers that really turns my geek instincts on. Perhaps over the summer if I have some spare cash I will order a PCB based on one of these and solder one up. It would be a fun project and give me a computer that I would not feel guilty running all the time.
Seth
true. im feeling like wiring up a house with these, so that i can control light switches and so on thru them.
with the right web interface in place i can have them all call into a central server and i can see what rooms have their lights still on and turn them of with a single click.
or you just get off your lazy ass and walk to the room and do it.
> im feeling like wiring up a house with these, so that i can control light switches and so on thru them.
You don’t need $200 board to control the light switch unless your name is Bill Gates =]
Edited 2006-04-25 12:04
heh, it would more be a experiment in home-buildt automation then anything else.
allso, depending on how its wired, you dont need that many of it i guess.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If you are a fan of MIPS and ARM like me, there is a very interesting article at linuxdevices. Godson2 from BLX (MIPS64) is alive and running. There is a Chinese $100 PC with MIPS64. The end of x86 world dominance? ARM has a future as an IYONIX or A9 but these desktops are soooooo expensive. However Godson2 and possibly upcoming products will have much more performance. If the colombian SBC had similar specs like A9 with 256MB or RAM I would be interested. Until then , the “MUNICATOR” is coming. MIPS64 was always the future.
Is it possible to buy these MIPS64 machines in China? Anybody got any ideas of where to go?
Not to spoil the feast, I hope, but the NSLU2 Linux community is alive and kicking on a similar, Linksys provided device.
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/gallery/
I have one for myself (AppWeb, svn, ssh…) and it works effortlessly 24/7.
Now, that does NOT mean I wouldn’t be interested in this Colombian beauty. Are the schematics open source? There was a similar, open source hw project on a German university, but that died quietly before really coming out of the closet. Why?
Atmel has a conflict of interest here; they’d better get their AT91 as being “the” engine for open source Linux-on-a-chip (almost) platforms, but on the other hand that eats from the cup of their current, commercial vendors.
Atmel, please please make a viable entry-level protoboard, similar or same as this is, which can be commercially bought for a fair price. The current Colombian specs would do (LCD with Linux support very much preferred…
Debian already supports ARM chips. Which were the additional changes needed in the kernel to make this single board work?
Are the patches available anywhere?
The processor has a lot of things bundled.
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/product_card.asp?part_id=2983
These patches are needed to make them work.
http://maxim.org.za/AT91RM9200/2.6/
It’s explained here.
http://linux.embebido.org/ecb_at91/ecb_at91.pdf