Flutterby™! : Embedded Linux 2007-04-27 04:15:42.90588+00

Embedded Linux

2007-04-27 04:15:42.90588+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Tonight's break from 3d programming on the Mac was firing up Linux on an Atmel AVR32. Serial port to the console gave me a BusyBox shell, but since the development board had ethernet interfaces I used "wget" to download to it from a web server running on my development machine, and wrote pretty pixels to a little 320x240 display by memory mapping /dev/fb0.

I want to see what a chip with a reasonable amount of SDRAM and enough local PROM to use the SD card for external storage would cost in decent quantity, 'cause this is a neat little embedded platform...

And their development platform either runs under Cygwin on Windows, or Linux, and they've got Ubuntu packages. Getting back on a Linux box is so nice, the windows snap, all of the tools you'd expect are in the right place, I spend time coding rather than looking for how stuff works and trying to get all the libraries installed.

what sort of eval board are you running that on? and how much flash/ram is on it? sounds like a nice little toy I might need to acquire...

You might wanna check to see if the ATNWG100 has the boot ROM set up for Linux, if so then it looks like adding an SD card would give a cool little two ethernet, serial and USB single board computer for $70 quantity 1.

Oh, and just because I wanted to get a feel for the processor, I grabbed Freetype and built a little thingie that created bitmaps of a basic TTF font I had lying around here, at at 64 pixels high was getting 850 characters/second (running through the ASCII alphabet). Totally unscientific benchmark, haven't tried tuning anything, but I wanted a number I could toss at some folks.

Further... I think that processor can be clocked 5x what the STK1002 daughterboard is running it at, and it looks like you might even be able to add an LCD to that ATNWG100 board, which'd make that a kickass little basis for experimentation, and more power than the first name server at the ISP that Meuon and I started...