New interesting devices

2009-03-05T12:04:00+01:00

Recently few interesting devices appeared on a market. And they have high geek factor D:

SheevaPlug

SheevaPlug from Marvell contains MV88F6281 cpu running at 1.2GHz with 512MB of DDR2/800 memory. Other nice things are:

1GbE network controller
512MB of NAND for storage
USB 2.0 controller (up to 480Mbps speed)
RS232 serial port
ARM JTAG
SDIO slot
U-boot as bootloader

Everything in small package and for only 99 USD. I think that this will be nice addon to my collection of ARM devices (it is also one of fastest available ones).

Touch Book

Few days ago Koen Kooi wrote on his blog about Touch Book. It is ARM (TI OMAP3) based combination of tablet and netbook. Composed from two detachable parts it can be tablet (one part) or netbook (two parts connected).

There are few things in it’s design which make it special:

8.9” 1024x600 touchscreen
up to 15h on battery (in netbook mode)
two internal USB connectors to hide dongles inside
six USB connectors in total
just 0.9kg
no fans, no moving parts
opensource design
runs Ångström based distribution

Total price is 399 USD for netbook or 299 USB for tablet. Too bad that they offer selling to US only — but this can be handled by US friends D:

To get one or to not get one is tricky question. Current design lacks any video output so using it instead of laptop will be hard (no way to show presentation slides) but size, weight and battery time are interesting. I will definitely track their progress.

BeagleBoard C2

At the end of March new version (C2) of BeagleBoard has to be released. It has 256MB ram compared to 128MB of currently sold B7 version and also working EHCI USB port (B7 offers only one OTG port). I planned to buy this version but now I am not sure about it — Touch Book looks too interesting D:

Project for writing GPL driver for 8385 Marvell wifi chipset

2006-11-25T12:05:00+01:00

Yesterday new project was born: writing free driver for Marvell 8385 based WLAN cards. Currently there are few persons involved including me and Holger Schurig. Join us if you are interested.

Holger did research and found that driver for 8388 (USB version of chipset) is GPL licensed and contain newer version of WLAN interface then cf8385 driver which we got from company which sent us cards. I diffed both versions and it looks like USB version has some support for 2.6 kernel added already.

We currently does not have any timeline for release — first we need to get it built against 2.6.19-rc kernel.

Marcin Juszkiewicz - marvell

New interesting devices

SheevaPlug

Touch Book

BeagleBoard C2

Project for writing GPL driver for 8385 Marvell wifi chipset