http://www.embeddedarm.com/epc/ts7200-spec-h.html
From the blurb:
"TS-7200 Single Board Computer
200 MHz ARM processor for Linux * ARM9 processor with MMU * 32 MB SDRAM * 8 MB Flash drive (16 MB optional) * 10/100 Ethernet * Compact Flash * 2 USB host ports * 2 COM ports * 20 DIO * PC/104 expansion bus * Optional A/D and RS-485 * Optional 802.11b WiFi"
What makes this interesting to be (with my Copious Free Time) is that the USB ports are HOST ports, unlike gunstix's CLIENT ports. The latter has always bugged me: I want an SBC to which I can plug in a NIC & a webcam and run a cheap SIP-based video source (aka "security camera", aka "baby monitor"). All on Squeak, of course!
frank
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That looks really nice. The power is great, though it would be nice if it were a little faster.
Another interesting machine has just shown up, pointed out to me by John Maloney...
I thought this might be of interest. The Dynabook is getting closer and closer...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7977737/
The article doesn't give the screen size, but it looks like about VGA in the photo. It seems quite inexpensive for what you get. Maybe you have to sign up for some sort of service plan to get it...
-- John
The Nokia770 is what we're talking about here. Linux, 800*480 16bpp screen, 64Mb ram, 128Mb flash (about half used by system) A longish list of ordinary boring app provided. Usual file formats supported (mp3, mpeg1, jpeg, all that), 802.11b/g (good for the g), bluetooth, usb. Weighs about 8oz, about 6x3.0.75" Sort of a very cute sideways palm.
The CPU is apparently the TI version of the ARM9 @ 220MHz. That will be roughly the same performance as my older RPCs (less cpu by a tiny fraction, better memory access) so Squeak would be ok but not great in Morphic performance. 64Mb of ram would be a bit tight with linux and x11 and gnome running all at once.
Strip the pointless unix junk out of it and put a real OS in instead and it could be a very nice portable exobox device. Just 5 years too late....
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim "Bollocks," said Pooh being more forthright than usual
Tim Rowledge wrote:
The Nokia770 is what we're talking about here. Linux, 800*480 16bpp screen, 64Mb ram, 128Mb flash (about half used by system) A longish list of ordinary boring app provided. Usual file formats supported (mp3, mpeg1, jpeg, all that), 802.11b/g (good for the g), bluetooth, usb. Weighs about 8oz, about 6x3.0.75" Sort of a very cute sideways palm.
The CPU is apparently the TI version of the ARM9 @ 220MHz. That will be roughly the same performance as my older RPCs (less cpu by a tiny fraction, better memory access) so Squeak would be ok but not great in Morphic performance. 64Mb of ram would be a bit tight with linux and x11 and gnome running all at once.
Very intriguing!
Strip the pointless unix junk out of it and put a real OS in instead and it could be a very nice portable exobox device. Just 5 years too late....
"...real OS..."? Like what, Tim? Does stripping the "pointless" stuff out make it (Linux) real or is there something else you'd do?
From what I can see, the exobox never reached the light of day. Why
would this device redux be 5 yrs too late?
Bob
Bob Courchaine bobc@nfldinet.com wrote:
"...real OS..."? Like what, Tim? Does stripping the "pointless" stuff out make it (Linux) real or is there something else you'd do?
By 'real OS' I mean an OS intended for small machines. It could almost certainly be a variant of linux or bsd or beos or whatever BUT my perception is that OS work tends to concentrate heavily on supporting big systems; SMP, journalling filesystems, mega-this and giga-that. A household tablet for browsing the web and controlling your tivoMatic and heating etc simply doesn't need that. Even assuming 'just use a linix kernel' is tolerable, a load of peripheral dross has to be dropped from the distribution; most unices have eleventy-trillion files scattered around in a manner that might be convenient to system administrators but really makes little sense for people.
We made a valiant attempt to tackle this at Interval for the WebPad by making an OS that let Squeak handle realtime events and processor scheduling all the way down. Killed by billg.
I'm certainly not a fan of unix-as-it-exists, nor indeed of dos, windows, amigaos, risc os (though I tolerate it on a daily basis) or any other os I've had to use. They're all horribly flawed.
From what I can see, the exobox never reached the light of day. Why
would this device redux be 5 yrs too late?
Trivial answer - it's 5 years too late for exobox More serious answer - I suspect the market isn't really there anymore unless the price is _really_ low. exobox lived in a time when the US economy still existed and people wanted to spend money on nice gadgets.
The exobox s/w was based on the idea of a stripped down linux running on 2- 300MHz P3s or thereabouts, the best cheap machines that could reasonably be sourced back in 99/2000-01. Even then they were something like $500.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim Strange OpCodes: SG: Show Garbage
We made a valiant attempt to tackle this at Interval for the WebPad by making an OS that let Squeak handle realtime events and processor scheduling all the way down. Killed by billg.
Dammit. How far did you guys get with this? How did Squeak do at handling realtime events & processor schedules?
Brent Vukmer brent.vukmer@gmail.com wrote:
We made a valiant attempt to tackle this at Interval for the WebPad by
making
an OS that let Squeak handle realtime events and processor scheduling all
the
way down. Killed by billg.
Dammit. How far did you guys get with this?
Quite a long way. We had a working piece of handheld hardware that we showed at OOPSLA 99(?) which scheduled all tasks via Squeak. This included all the machine code written tasks for networky stuff etc. It also had a Slang to object-code translator that was on the way to being able to generate prims on the fly (for device drivers etc).
How did Squeak do at handling realtime events & processor schedules?
Quite well. It certainly wasn't finished in any production sense but it ran a really rather big test suite without problems. The realtime requirements were 'moderately hard' rather than 'very hard' but it could manage many thousands of interrupts per second IIRC.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim Useful Latin Phrases:- Fac ut gaudeam = Make my day.
So both this effort and the exobox were vaporized. I see a trend...
Tim, in your opinion, would this be worth trying one more time?
If so, would it have to be started from scratch or is anything out there that could be reused/revived?
Bob
Tim Rowledge wrote:
Brent Vukmer brent.vukmer@gmail.com wrote:
We made a valiant attempt to tackle this at Interval for the WebPad by
making
an OS that let Squeak handle realtime events and processor scheduling all
the
way down. Killed by billg.
Dammit. How far did you guys get with this?
Quite a long way. We had a working piece of handheld hardware that we showed at OOPSLA 99(?) which scheduled all tasks via Squeak. This included all the machine code written tasks for networky stuff etc. It also had a Slang to object-code translator that was on the way to being able to generate prims on the fly (for device drivers etc).
How did Squeak do at handling realtime events & processor schedules?
Quite well. It certainly wasn't finished in any production sense but it ran a really rather big test suite without problems. The realtime requirements were 'moderately hard' rather than 'very hard' but it could manage many thousands of interrupts per second IIRC.
Bob Courchaine bobc@nfldinet.com wrote:
So both this effort and the exobox were vaporized. I see a trend...
And don't forget the Active Book, a 1990 era tablet running Smalltalk on an ARM2. I worked on that one too, until the company was bought out by ATT and closed down; an easy way to reduce competition for the very useless PenPoint/Go/EO stuff.
Oh, and the Momenta, which ran a version of Digitalk ST/V on a X86 variant and had poor battery life.
Tim, in your opinion, would this be worth trying one more time?
It's almost always trying again when the idea is a good one.
If so, would it have to be started from scratch or is anything out there that could be reused/revived?
Knowledge mostly is reusable. Code rarely. There are a number of people with experience of working on these things and a way to get them together with funding to really tackle the problem would be needed. Clear aims are kinda useful when hoping to make a product- exobox was the only place I ever worked at with that part under control.
Whether it's really sensible to try to make Squeak be an OS is an interesting argument. I suspect the answer these days is 'no' because one really doesn't want to rewrite tcp/ip stacks if possible, just as one example.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim Strange OpCodes: CSF: Charge to NSF
Bob Courchaine wrote on Thu, 26 May 2005 14:12:12 -0500
Tim, in your opinion, would this be worth trying one more time?
This reminded me that I should have done a follow up to my "Squeak for MIT Media Lab laptop project" proposal a while ago.
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-April/090833 .html
When the end of April came and went with nobody joining the team I decided to consider it a failure and to retract my offer to lead such a group in whatever direction the Squeak community thought best. I did enjoy the related discussions on this list, however, and learned much from them. So much so that I am still doing this, but on my own and in the direction *I* think is best.
In this case I took Lex's "old code is good code" advice very seriously and came up with a way to start out with a modified Squeak and then build my Neo Smalltalk *under* it (no license worries ;-) piece by piece. I had always planned to include Squeak compatiblity, but the previous idea was to leave that for later and add it slowly.
Instead of running Squeak bytecodes directly the hardware will run Plurion bytecodes (an early draft can be found in http://www.merlintec.com/download/plurion.pdf) with a small software layer on top of that (which is later to grow into the full Neo Smalltalk) to support the Squeak bytecodes. The next layer up will be a small Squeak image including all of the virtual machine but the bytecode interpreter. This will probably be based on Spoon. The top layer will be a regular Squeak image.
Meanwhile, I have been trying to get something close to my original option 2 (Squeak on hidden Linux layer) running on my next web server machine. Fflinux seems too specific to the ITX motherboard, so that wasn't a good option. Other very small Linuxes seem to be based on 2.0.x kernels and that probably isn't a good idea for what I want to do. I tried the "Linux From Scratch" route but can't even compile glibc properly. Suddenly rewritting a whole TCP/IP stack in Smalltalk doesn't sound so bad ;-)
-- Jecel
Tim Rowledge wrote:
memory access) so Squeak would be ok but not great in Morphic performance. 64Mb
Remember when app 60% Dorado (original smalltalk benchmark set) was considered a quite usable Smalltalk machine. That is what, 0.5% of the CPU power in this one?
memory access) so Squeak would be ok but not great in Morphic performance. 64Mb of ram would be a bit tight with linux and x11 and gnome running all at once.
It would be enough with a minimal Linux kernel and Squeak running in frame buffer mode :-)
Michael
On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 19:25 +0200, Michael Rueger wrote:
Tim Rowledge wrote:
memory access) so Squeak would be ok but not great in Morphic performance. 64Mb
Remember when app 60% Dorado (original smalltalk benchmark set) was considered a quite usable Smalltalk machine. That is what, 0.5% of the CPU power in this one?
memory access) so Squeak would be ok but not great in Morphic performance. 64Mb of ram would be a bit tight with linux and x11 and gnome running all at once.
Actually, it is a (small) subset of Gnome.
It is roughly the GPE environment from handhelds.org, at least that is my strong guess.
We run that on machines as small as 16 meg of RAM. So most of the RAM should be free for your use.... Regards, - Jim
Michael Rueger michael@impara.de wrote:
Tim Rowledge wrote:
memory access) so Squeak would be ok but not great in Morphic performance.
64Mb
Remember when app 60% Dorado (original smalltalk benchmark set) was considered a quite usable Smalltalk machine. That is what, 0.5% of the CPU power in this one?
My Iyonix is ~2.5 times faster than the OMAP in the nokia, and scores around 20 dorado. It ought to positively _fly_ but the big problem is in the UI side of things. Morphic does a great deal more than monchrome MVC with a direct frame buffer, and then has to worm through OS calls to finally get to the screen. Even on my 1.5GHz pBook it feels sluggish!
The way to combat this is to force the people working on morphic (or indeed tweak) UI stuff to use really slow machines. It's amazing how much optimisation can get done that way.
memory access) so Squeak would be ok but not great in Morphic performance.
64Mb
of ram would be a bit tight with linux and x11 and gnome running all at
once.
It would be enough with a minimal Linux kernel and Squeak running in frame buffer mode :-)
Yes, it probably would. Though the Squeak image would need a bit of shrinking to leave much room for serious usage. I run with 60Mb of object space most of the time (dispaly memory, OS usage not included) and it can be tight.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim "Yummy" said Pooh, as he rotated Piglet slowly on the spit.
This runs Linux+Gnome. The interesting thing is now: Gnome is even younger than Squeak (I think it started in the fall of 1997).
The big question now is: Why does this device not run Squeak as the OS/GUI? Why is Squeak as a project not in a state that it could be the OS of this device? Or: Why did Squeak fail?
Marcus
Am 26.05.2005 um 18:18 schrieb Dan Ingalls:
That looks really nice. The power is great, though it would be nice if it were a little faster.
Another interesting machine has just shown up, pointed out to me by John Maloney...
I thought this might be of interest. The Dynabook is getting closer and closer...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7977737/
The article doesn't give the screen size, but it looks like about VGA in the photo. It seems quite inexpensive for what you get. Maybe you have to sign up for some sort of service plan to get it...
-- John
On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 18:31 +0200, Marcus Denker wrote:
This runs Linux+Gnome. The interesting thing is now: Gnome is even younger than Squeak (I think it started in the fall of 1997).
The big question now is: Why does this device not run Squeak as the OS/GUI? Why is Squeak as a project not in a state that it could be the OS of this device? Or: Why did Squeak fail?
Two big reasons in my mind: 1) the visual appearance of Squeak is terrible, and its UI is poor. People's standards are much higher today. When I play with Squeak, I find it a blast from the past (mid 1980's). Most people don't see past Squeak's appearance to its other virtues.... 2) The world is not all smalltalk... For better or worse, a critical mass of applications exist for Linux using C, C++, Python, Perl, etc, and any effectively closed environment will never go mainstream.
Regards, - Jim
Yeah, I'd like to get my hands on one.
Basically, Nokia has been doing work behind the scenes for over 2 years now funding quite a bit of development in the community.
I suspect that Opera is a stop-gap, until minimo (the version of mozilla for embedded use) matures, Nokia has been funding that work as well.
And it runs my favorite window system ;-).
The bottom line is that it should be very compatible with the mainline Linux development, which isn't true of most of the QTE based cellphone Linux devices out there. - Jim
On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 09:18 -0700, Dan Ingalls wrote:
That looks really nice. The power is great, though it would be nice if it were a little faster.
Another interesting machine has just shown up, pointed out to me by John Maloney...
I thought this might be of interest. The Dynabook is getting closer and closer...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7977737/
The article doesn't give the screen size, but it looks like about VGA in the photo. It seems quite inexpensive for what you get. Maybe you have to sign up for some sort of service plan to get it...
-- John
Try www.nokia.com/770 or http://tinyurl.com/7q6b6 for more details, specs and photos. Due out Q305, and on my wish list already. (-:
Gary
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Ingalls" Dan@SqueakLand.org To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 12:18 PM Subject: Re: Yet Another SBC
That looks really nice. The power is great, though it would be nice if it were a little faster.
Another interesting machine has just shown up, pointed out to me by John Maloney...
I thought this might be of interest. The Dynabook is getting closer and
closer...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7977737/
The article doesn't give the screen size, but it looks like about VGA in the photo. It seems quite inexpensive for what you get. Maybe you have to sign up for some sort of service plan to get it...
-- John
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