a hardware idea
-
first of all, i'm new here, but not new to programming and linux
i ordered 2 onion board with 1 minidock and 1 arduino dock
and i was just looking into the specs of the onion, and was wondering why a 16mb flash chip was used, and not a higher capacity one?yours, ramon.
-
@ramon-schepers welcome!
Unfortunately, the AR9331 chip that is at the heart of the Omega can only address 16MB of flash memory.
You can, however, setup the Omega to use external USB-storage as the root filesystem. Check out this wiki article!
Happy hacking!
-
@ramon-schepers Also, it is possible (using a partition on a USB drive) to set up a swap drive for the Omega - see https://community.onion.io/topic/9/how-to-install-gcc/47
-
i saw those articles, which made me wonder about the 16mb onboard flash
also, just thinking of something else with the omega, namely a all in one adapter board, with:
arduino-style header adapter with the needed level shifters, power, ethernet, microsd and analog potmeters using an attiny for analog to serial reads.please tell me your opinion on this.
-
seems i can't edit the post, but here's why i want such a layout:
to use a ili9340 or ili9341 screen with touch sensing and make a diy mini pc with gmenu2x as GUI
not that it'll be very efficient, but i want to have a prove of concept in my hands.
-
@ramon-schepers Interesting dock idea. If you design it we can help you manufacture it
Although the Omega itself probably doesn't have enough computing power to handle GUI. We are thinking about making a graphical co-processor for it, but then i think the majority of the people would just use Raspberry Pi for an application that has high graphics requirements.
-
sadly i am not a pro at pcb design, and am terrible at schematic design and usage (i mostly do my projects out of my head to be honest)
but i can give it a try and
design a board
order a test batch of 3 ast oshpark
test itif it fails, i'll need to redo the three steps above till i get it right
if i get enough support from the community, i'd go for it.
though, i have one request: the gerber files of my design need to be open source.
(i just like open source)and notes about the gui thing: i'm not going to drive a 640480 resolution (which is easy for a mcu at 168mhz), i'm planning on 320240 pixels (as the driver ic ili934x supports)
also, i think the raspberry pi isn't what all people want for diy assembling,
so basically i want to use the omega as a system on module, on which you can develop your own hardware and drivers for it using arduino headers
regarding the embedded gpu: i'd suggest looking at the FT8xx series spi gpu it has high resolution, touch drivers, audio management (though poor quality) all in one qfn package.
if you're going for a ft8xx gpu, i'd suggest a ft800 for a small size (240320px to 480272px (psp screen resolution))ramon.
-
@ramon-schepers Interesting ideas. Has some overlap with what I previously posted here : https://community.onion.io/topic/291/a-proposal-for-an-alternative-form-of-arduino-dock
I will follow your progress with interest.
-
Hi @ramon-schepers, Thanks for recommending FT8xx series. I will check it out.
