However, soon it appeared this processor was way to "small" to fulfil the needs I had. Small in the sense that it had too few memory (both ROM as well as RAM).
Also, there was no basic functionality available, such as a robust OS, USB functionality, ethernet functionality, web server, etc. etc.
Pure by luck, I met a colleague at the office who was experimenting with a couple of 8051 alternatives, to extent their automatic test cases environment (testing high quality Philips televisions). One of their test cases was the FoxBoard.
Honesty obeys me to say I'd never heard of it before. But since I heard it was running embedded Linux (waaawww!!!!), I was immediately triggered (read: very much interested).
I got some information from this colleague and one of the first things I did, was surfing on the inet to find more information about this small device.
I must say: when I read the specs of that device, I was really astonished! So much on such small board, running Linux!!!
There was USB, RS232, Ethernet, FTP, SSH, WebServer, Telnet,... Next to complete!
I immediately got me such board and ever since, I'm working on it to develop my home automation system (aka. domotics).
This is how the board I currently use, looks like:
This is the famous MCM Classic Red FoxBoard.
MCM means multi components module, since this chip contains next to the processor, also the RAM and FLASH chips (and maybe more), all in one.
I must say, I'm very satisfied about the board and have spent already many, many hours developing software on it.
One of the first things I needed, was a decently working I2C driver. The original one was not really performing the way I wanted it to perform, so I decided to rewrite most of the existing driver.
That resulted in a stable, reliable and fast I2C driver which I made freely available under the GPL license to the FoxBoard community. You can find it here: Tuned I2C driver
Since my whole system is running on the I2C protocol, I don't have to worry about this one any more. At least, my basic protocol is working fine, the rest of the software/hardware is based on this protocol.
In the mean time, there's a newer version available, which has more FRAM and RAM. Here's a picture of the new version:
This new board has 16MB of FRAM and 32MB or RAM! More than enough to do wonderful things with it...
You can find lots of information on the AcmeSystems web site:
http://www.acmesystems.it
There's also a newsgroup about the FoxBoard, which you can find here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/foxboard/
Attention: a Yahoo account is needed to be able to actively participate in this newsgroup.
--Geert
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