On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 04:42:02PM +0200, RJ Scarbeary wrote:
> I already have one of these babies for my Audrey project and it works great,

You're into Audreys too huh?  What have you done so far?

So far I haven't done much; have tried playing MP3s, which mostly sucks
(when streaming, there are dropouts; and there is always some noise on
the line-out) but just having a touchscreen web browser is quite useful.
I have PHP scripts to control my lights, stream voicemail messages, and a
few other odds and ends.

I want to write a Photon caller ID GUI which will wake up the Audrey and
show a popup dialog.  Gotta build up a spare PC for QNX development
first.

I didn't have the guts to re-flash it but after getting the shell
working, being able to copy new programs on there is mostly good enough.
And maybe someday I'll be able to NFS-mount more stuff too.

I would like to have Java support.

> good quality, works in Linux of course! Also works on other OS. Runs from a
> floppy cable and floppy power wires. The only draw back is they are just on

That seems strange; it must require special drivers, if it's on the
floppy connector? IDE is very direct, because IDE and PCMCIA (and
consequently CF) are pretty much the same signalling standard (just
different pin arrangement). I found an adapter board online which plugs
directly onto a motherboard IDE header, and accepts a CF card.  I like
those for embedded stuff.  

After finding the Audrey was such a lousy audio device, I wanted to build
a very quiet machine whose main purpose would be to run NAS or esd or
something like that, in the bedroom.  I can use an Audrey to run a web
GUI to select files, and the web server will decode the MP3 and stream
audio to the audio server.  The CF will be great for that purpose.  I had
it booting Linux from the card.  Also my CNC controller machine runs DOS
from a CF card.  In that application it's just like a hard drive (small
is OK, and DOS isn't constantly writing to the root filesystem so no need
to play games with ramdisks).  So far with Linux, it seems to me your
root fs should be a ramdisk if you're using FLASH instead of a hard
drive, because when you mount drives it has to write to /etc/mtab; and
utmp gets written to a lot; there are log files; etc.  Anybody know
workarounds for this stuff so Linux can run on a read-only fs?

Ah here's where I got those adapters, I think:

http://www.pcengines.com/testordr.htm

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