> > Want FreeRTOS? Or one of these boards? > > One of those boards. I run lots of FreeRTOS. (ARM7, Philips > LPC2xxx)
I'll keep that in mind. > > Other minor peripherals: Consumer IR (tv remote) receiver, > > Eh...lots of stuff has IR but nothing ever seems to use it. ;) I had a few pins left over, had to think of *something* to put on them, and a friend of mine had just asked for help debugging an IR repeater module... Hence the ambient light sensor, thermistor, and IR. > > For my second RX project, I was thinking of a board with an ethernet > > switch chip (the RX has MII) and a USB hub chip, plus microsd and > > sdram. That gives you a home firewall/appliance/server box with 2Gb > > of "disk space" and 64 Mb of RAM. > > This all sounds like lots of fun to me. Maybe a hair more SDRAM > might be nice though. The chip supports up to 128 Mbyte directly. The board accepts up to a 64 Mbyte chip (32Mx16bit); You'd need to pair two 64Mx8 chips to fill the available address space. The SDRAM (SDR, not DDR) is one of the most expensive parts of the board; I put only 32Mb on the first one because it was $25 cheaper than the 64Mb chip. The sdram controller on the RX is naive, though. It does a full ras/cas cycle to read each word, so it takes 5 cycles per read (no burst). Combine that with a half-speed external bus (50 MHz) and you're talking a 10 mhz "read rate" (20 mbyte/sec max throughput, 40 for the 32-bit bus on the BGA version). The RX chip allows you to overclock the external bus but I don't know how reliable that would be with the sdram chip on the same bus as the fpga. > I especially like the ability to power-cycle the board without > re-enumerating on the USB. That's good thinking. Only the FT232R does that. The native USB still resets. > Has anyone done up a nice Forth system for that processor > architecture? I might attempt it if I can get a cheap development > board. (it'd have to be SUPER cheap the way things are going down > here lately, though) If you want to try for the contest, they'll give you an RX-RDK board free. No sdram on it though. Costs $99 otherwise. How much stuff do you *need* on a "super cheap development board" ? All you really need to develop RX code is the chip ($18) and an FT232R ($4.50 plus $1 for the connector). Maybe a 3.3v regulator ($0.50). Adding SDRAM only costs as much as the sdram chip itself. I can hook you up with a simulator and development tools if you want to play with it... _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user