There should be no soldering needed to make the board useful. The wifi is a mini-PCIe form factor, it just pushes into the socket. You DO have to plug in an antenna of some sort, its a standard UFL jack on the module.
All the other connectors are on the board, putting it in the case is just putting it in place so the connectors go through the holes and either screwing the board in or pushing down onto some of those nylon hold downs. I really want to put the DAC on the GEN1 board. It's a new design I haven't used before and I want to have a platform to play around with the internal DSP. I want to find out how good we can make this sound. Someone else brought up an interesting aspect, if the DSP is done in the DAC, it can't be applied to the S/PDIF or USB. For just straight playback, that won't matter since the only thing I will be doing with at least at first is the interpolation filter, which is already included in any external DAC. For long term GEN2 it might be best to have the FPGA DSP based system, then you can do anything you want and it will be useful for all outputs. But that is definitely NOT going to be in GEN1. I did some more poking around the processor/memory issues, it's a bit more complicated than I thought at first. It looks like the best bet for GEN1 is a 720MHz processor and 256MB RAM. This does not have TDMI interface, it does have an LCD interface. For GEN2 a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM, this comes with a full blown video controller and built in HDMI and VGA interface. No need for external chips, just hook up connectors. The GEN1 is a much simpler board layout task so I would like to go with it. I COULD do the faster processor from the get-go, put its more work and costs a little more (about $10 more for the board, about $15 more for the processor and $20 more for the memory). I actually did a full quote on board costs and its actually right around what I thought, the board and assembly for a GEN1 will be $64 for 25, The GEN2 is about $75. So the rest of the cost is the parts which look like around $90 to $100 for a Gen 1. So that hits the $170 for the board. It's $35 for the wifi module which you can add at any time. The place I'm working with does the parts procurement as well, so it's just send files and money and a couple weeks later get a box of fully assembled boards. The Gen1 board will have no display, so all development has to be over ssh or serial port. I'll probably put a serial port on it so you can have a hardware console during boot. So it looks like it will have an ethernet jack, 2 USB-A jacks, serial jack, S/PDIF coax, 2 RCA jacks. The big question is, should it have a headphone jack. The easy, inexpensive headphone circuits are not all that great and add more complexity to the board. I know how to make a REALLY good headphone amp, but it will add quite a bit of complexity to the board and some extra cost. So what are your thoughts: 1; no headphone jack 2; simple, cheap, not so great 3; whole hog really good, but complex and pricy. John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97881 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
