I'm sure many people on this list have seen the relatively recent HDD based MP3 players that have come into the market (if not: http://www.pjbox.com).
What strikes me as incredible is that there hasn't appeared an entry in the PDA market based on this concept (that I know of). I would love to have a device that has 20GB of secondary storage that fits into a shirt pocket. I would love it even more if it ran Squeak (of course) and could:
- become the computational engine (or just storage) for your home entertainment system (with that much storage you could store a good bit of video, mp3s, video games, etc) - interface with a automobile computer system - serve all the traditional PDA functions - interface with your home network (and automatically back itself up overnight) - plug into a desktop or laptop form factor as it's computational engine (or it's storage) - interface with a home and cellular wireless network
Does anyone know of such a device? Seems like it could be a huge market. Current PDAs are too limited in terms of storage capacity and it's a pain to keep them in sync. The current devices only have about 12MB of DRAM, but I would imagine you could build something with 256MB of DRAM or more and still keep it small.
- Stephen
Sounds like a good niche (*and* a good idea). Very Star Trek. I think the current reason pocket devices don't have 256MB of RAM is power (not the M$ kind). I believe it was on this list about a week ago someone posted a link to an interesting processor design by Charles Moore -- a *very* heavily stack-oriented machine, somewhat like the Transputer (but more so). At one point they mentioned that power consumption would be dominated by the RAM that was attached. I was surprised, as I always thought of, say, the easy-bake ovens Intel sells as Pentia as the power-mad components.
-Mark
On Thursday, September 6, 2001, at 09:41 pm, Stephen Pair wrote:
I'm sure many people on this list have seen the relatively recent HDD based MP3 players that have come into the market (if not: http://www.pjbox.com).
What strikes me as incredible is that there hasn't appeared an entry in the PDA market based on this concept (that I know of). I would love to have a device that has 20GB of secondary storage that fits into a shirt pocket. I would love it even more if it ran Squeak (of course) and could:
- become the computational engine (or just storage) for your home
entertainment system (with that much storage you could store a good bit of video, mp3s, video games, etc)
- interface with a automobile computer system
- serve all the traditional PDA functions
- interface with your home network (and automatically back itself up
overnight)
- plug into a desktop or laptop form factor as it's computational engine
(or it's storage)
- interface with a home and cellular wireless network
Does anyone know of such a device? Seems like it could be a huge market. Current PDAs are too limited in terms of storage capacity and it's a pain to keep them in sync. The current devices only have about 12MB of DRAM, but I would imagine you could build something with 256MB of DRAM or more and still keep it small.
- Stephen
The current devices only have about 12MB of DRAM
You sound like you are describing PalmOS devices. Calling a Palm a PDA is like calling DOS an operating system: the former is only a half-step up from an organizer, and the latter is just a program loader. On the other hand, the iPAQ started with 32MB RAM and has a 64MB unit. HP just announced a 64MB device. Intel announced that units within a few years will have massive amounts of RAM. Toshiba has a PDA with a built-in microdrive.
With respect to your MP3 example, drive-based MP3 players hold so much because they are significantly larger and heavier than a PDA, with enough room for a 2.5" notebook drive. Most have relatively little RAM, but it is sufficient to buffer the stream coming off the HD, which helps extend battery life.
All things considered, I'd just as soon have a wireless connection from my PDA to network storage.
--- Noel
The current devices only have about 12MB of DRAM
You sound like you are describing PalmOS devices. Calling a Palm a PDA is like calling DOS an operating system: the former is only a half-step up from an organizer, and the latter is just a program loader.
Yes, I know...the PalmOS is quite quirky. I don't know what makes you think I was describing PalmOS though. I meant the current MP3 players with built-in HDD have 12 MB of *DRAM*...I was just suggesting that with something on the order of 128MB of DRAM and perhaps a better micro processor (don't know what they use), these devices could be more general in their purpose.
On the other hand, the iPAQ started with 32MB RAM and has a 64MB unit. HP just announced a 64MB device. Intel announced that units within a few years will have massive amounts of RAM. Toshiba has a PDA with a built-in microdrive.
64MB is just not enough though. The Toshiba sounds interesting.
With respect to your MP3 example, drive-based MP3 players hold so much because they are significantly larger and heavier than a PDA, with enough room for a 2.5" notebook drive. Most have relatively little RAM, but it is sufficient to buffer the stream coming off the HD, which helps extend battery life.
Yes, but these devices are much smaller than early PDAs now, and they'll get smaller and lighter.
All things considered, I'd just as soon have a wireless connection from my PDA to network storage.
I'm sure some people will be ok with that, but I would like to have all of my information and applications stored locally on the device. I can't really say why (maybe it's speed, or reliability of the connection...there are plenty of places on this planet where a wireless connection wouldn't reach), but that's just what I think I would prefer.
- Stephen
Gimme a couple of megabucks and I will produce what you want.
How about ~800mips, 256b ram, 5Gb disk, 802.11b, USB, audio in/out, 320@240 LCD, video out, small camera? Probably sell for around $1k.
I'm serious; I know all the people I would need to get together to do this.
tim
On Friday 07 September 2001 07:41 am, Tim Rowledge wrote:
Gimme a couple of megabucks and I will produce what you want.
How about ~800mips, 256b ram, 5Gb disk, 802.11b, USB, audio in/out, 320@240 LCD, video out, small camera? Probably sell for around $1k.
Oh yeah, it's gotta run for at least 8 hours on a small Li+ battery pack (1W or less power consumption).
I've been looking around for a single-board computer or PDA with:
* enough speed to run Squeak (probably on Linux though I'm going to be using VNC rather than X as a server) (though we may have to forego using Morphic) * 64Mb of memory * a USB MASTER (_not_ client) connection OR at least 4 serial ports (I can use USB-serial adapters) * an Ethernet connection * a hard drive interface * less than 3W of power consumption (I'd prefer 1W, but...) * sound capabilities would be nice
Note that a 2.5" notebook hard drive, depending on the kind, can easily require over 2W when running; the IBM microdrive takes 825mW when running and 66mW when on standby, so I've already got quite a power hit here.
The usual PDA model of "take it home and charge it up" won't work here, as it's an entirely battery powered system that depends on solar to recharge batteries on a good day (we have 400W peak solar capability, but the Northwest isn't noted for being constantly sunny). However, this also has to be able to run for a few days in the dark (we have big storage batteries, but 5W is quite a load).
Many of the available ARM SBC's seem to be aimed at the PDA or "internet appliance" market; their USB is always of the client flavor, rather than master. And they also typically don't have 4 serial ports.
Any suggestions?
On Fri, 7 Sep 2001 09:29:20 -0700 Ned Konz ned@bike-nomad.com wrote:
On Friday 07 September 2001 07:41 am, Tim Rowledge wrote:
Gimme a couple of megabucks and I will produce what you want.
How about ~800mips, 256b ram, 5Gb disk, 802.11b, USB, audio in/out, 320@240 LCD, video out, small camera? Probably sell for around $1k.
Many of the available ARM SBC's seem to be aimed at the PDA or "internet appliance" market; their USB is always of the client flavor, rather than master. And they also typically don't have 4 serial ports.
Any suggestions?
Yes, search in google for "panelpc", there are good things in the industrial embedded market (pc compatible, usb, hard disk (maybe in flash), lcd touchscreen ). If you found something in the <$700 range, please give me the link :)
- Nahuel Greco Web Development - Open Source - - http://www.codelarvs.com.ar Game Programming - Research - - Freelance coding / sysadmin Networking. The answer is 42. -
"Ned Konz" said:
I've been looking around for a single-board computer or PDA with:
Sounds like you're in the market for a Kay Dynabook. <G>
You mention running Squeak under Linux, which is certainly a fine choice, but I wonder if a "specialized general purpose machine" of the PDA class could reasonably be built to run Squeak native? The Mitsubishi M32R/D processor has been touted from time to time as being able to do so, and though I don't know if that's a suitable processor for such a thing, I do wonder if a "Squeak Chip" is on the horizon anywhere.
Speaking of the M32R/D, every link I've found leads to nebulous marketing info or a dead end. Does anyone here know just what the Squeak - M32R/D association produced?
Thanks
Gary Fisher Spectrum Electronics, Inc.
On Friday 07 September 2001 02:14 pm, Gary Fisher wrote:
Sounds like you're in the market for a Kay Dynabook. <G>
Sure. Got one?
You mention running Squeak under Linux, which is certainly a fine choice, but I wonder if a "specialized general purpose machine" of the PDA class could reasonably be built to run Squeak native?
Do you mean to interpret Squeak bytecodes? I suspect that it would take some interesting manipulation to write an interrupt handler in Squeak, or to write the actual kernel (GC and all)...
There's got to be a reason that the Lisp machines etc. of the '80's are no longer being made. Maybe it's just the death of the AI industry, or maybe people found that they couldn't keep up with the performance of Intel's general-purpose chips. Maybe it's just economics.
It's never been easier for the garage hacker to make his own processor, with high-density FPGAs and CPLDs easily available. There are even free tools available for these.
I see Linux or WinCE or whatever as more a packaging scheme for hardware drivers and filesystems than anything else. Using them I can get Other People's Code to do these things.
"Ned Konz" said:
Sounds like you're in the market for a Kay Dynabook. <G>
Sure. Got one?
Um, let's see -- you want it in Slate or in Putty? I've got both materials on hand.
(-:
Thank you for your reply, Ned, and thanks especially to John Maloney and Alan Kay for filling in and adding some details on the M32R/D story.
I agree that building on a commodity OS makes development easier, at least at first, but in production anything extraneous needs to be avoided. Squeak is capable of acting as its own OS; anything else between it and the hardware must be justified in terms of processor time, hardware complication, power consumption and overall system complexity. I'd love to replace the Virtual Machine with a Virtuous Machine. <G>
Gary Fisher Spectrum Electronics, Inc.
Gary --
We got Squeak going on the M32R/D several years ago. It worked fine. An excellent Berkely grad student whose name escapes me right now did a lot of the work with some supervision by John Maloney.
I think that Mitsubishi subsequently sold the M32R/D design and process to Motorola -- and we have heard nothing since about it.
Cheers,
Alan
5:14 PM -0400 9/7/01, Gary Fisher wrote:
"Ned Konz" said:
I've been looking around for a single-board computer or PDA with:
Sounds like you're in the market for a Kay Dynabook. <G>
You mention running Squeak under Linux, which is certainly a fine choice, but I wonder if a "specialized general purpose machine" of the PDA class could reasonably be built to run Squeak native? The Mitsubishi M32R/D processor has been touted from time to time as being able to do so, and though I don't know if that's a suitable processor for such a thing, I do wonder if a "Squeak Chip" is on the horizon anywhere.
Speaking of the M32R/D, every link I've found leads to nebulous marketing info or a dead end. Does anyone here know just what the Squeak - M32R/D association produced?
Thanks
Gary Fisher Spectrum Electronics, Inc.
We got Squeak going on the M32R/D several years ago. It worked fine. An excellent Berkely grad student whose name escapes me right now did a lot of the work with some supervision by John Maloney.
According to the M32R/D section on http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/271 that was Curtis Wickman.
Andreas
At 5:14 PM -0400 9/7/01, Gary Fisher wrote:
Speaking of the M32R/D, every link I've found leads to nebulous marketing info or a dead end. Does anyone here know just what the Squeak - M32R/D association produced?
It produced a fully functional Squeak VM that ran on an M32R/D prototyping board. It was the work of a summer intern at Mitsubishi's lab in Silicon Valley. When Alan came by to see it, he immediately took over the mouse and proceeded to give a full Squeak demo to the Mitsubishi execs. All the basics worked, including sound output.
I don't know what happened to the M32R/D project; I haven't heard much about it and get the impression that Mitsubishi has stopped working on it. There may be some fabrication issues, since they had to do something tricky to get DRAM and the processor on the same silicon substrate. (I don't know much about wafer fab, but I gather that DRAM and CPU's use different processes.)
We did another "bare chip" Squeak VM port at Disney. Jamie Robertson ported Squeak to a StrongARM developer's board. He wrote the display driver, touch screen driver, timer support, and basic access to a FAT16 file system on a compact flash card and it worked pretty nicely. There were some issues with noise in the touch-screen hardware that he had to overcome, but the effort only took three or four weeks. We didn't bother with sound I/O.
-- John
I wonder if a "specialized general purpose machine" of the PDA class
Why not? You could run Squeak natively on the iPAQ when the Squeak OS project gets to that stage.
The description of Jamie Robertson's work sounds like it would port nicely to the iPAQ: "We did another bare chip Squeak VM port at Disney. Jamie Robertson ported Squeak to a StrongARM developer's board. He wrote the display driver, touch screen driver, timer support, and basic access to a FAT16 file system on a compact flash card and it worked pretty nicely. There were some issues with noise in the touch-screen hardware that he had to overcome, but the effort only took three or four weeks. We didn't bother with sound I/O." Plus, they could pick up hardware interface and power management code from the handhelds.org linux project.
Throw in the redboot loader so that you can keep the HTC loader resident, and you'd be in very good shape.
--- Noel
Hello,
On the other hand, the iPAQ started with 32MB RAM and has a 64MB unit. HP just announced a 64MB device. Intel announced that units within a few years will have massive amounts of RAM. Toshiba has a PDA with a built-in microdrive.
64MB is just not enough though. The Toshiba sounds interesting.
The picture of the Toshiba is available at http://genio-e.com, though the text is written in Japanese.
It is a device that is a StringArm/PocketPC with SD card slot and CF slot in iPAQ size body.
The Microdrive is *not* built-in to the device. They only sell it together with the device.
# I know many people ignore and skip my emails...
As for the portable devices, the battery life would be one of the most important feature. If the battery runs out, it is just useless. And as for the portable music players, latest MD players have more than 140 hours (!) play time with less than 3 ounce package. Solid-state players are not the only way to go.
-- Yoshiki
64MB is just not enough though. The Toshiba sounds interesting.
64MB DRAM for executable memory, plus storage and support for paged memory. You can buy a 640MB CompactFlash which consumes very low power, as opposed to a 1GB micro-power-pig. In two years, you'll have PDAs with 256MB or more of executable memory.
Yes, but [hard drive based MP3] devices are much smaller than early PDAs now, and they'll get smaller and lighter.
Only if the hard drives get smaller, lighter, and less power-hungry.
All things considered, I'd just as soon have a wireless connection from my PDA to network storage.
I would like to have all of my information and applications stored locally on the device.
I am the same way. Buy a larger CF. I just bought a 256MB Viking CF for <$100.
--- Noel
There's the Pocket Linux Workstation at: http://mylinux.sourceforge.net/ http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/
They're trying to get enough orders to build a first production run. For US$699 (or less, depending on the size of the prod. run) you'd get:
Custom SuperH 7709A-166MHz, 128MB SDRAM, 64MB Flash, 240x320 TFT LCD Display, 8bpp, Touch Screen, USB, IrDA, Compact Flash, 2 PCMCIA Slots, Serial Port, Serial Cable, Developer Port, Audio Sound, Mono Speaker, Rechargeable Battery, Power Adapter (Hardware), CDROM Linux Software Distribution, Electronic Documentation (Software), Early Adopter/Wide Beta Program T-Shirt.
--yanni
Stephen Pair wrote: [snip]
Does anyone know of such a device? Seems like it could be a huge market. Current PDAs are too limited in terms of storage capacity and it's a pain to keep them in sync. The current devices only have about 12MB of DRAM, but I would imagine you could build something with 256MB of DRAM or more and still keep it small.
- Stephen
Yanni Jew yanni@home.com is widely believed to have written:
There's the Pocket Linux Workstation at: http://mylinux.sourceforge.net/ http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/
Promising spec in all but CPU- a superH at 166MHz will be _really_ slow. No chance for morphic or anything like it. My 200MHz StrongARM (which is significantly quicker) is useless for Morphic.
tim
Stephen,
You might try an iPaq with an IBM microdrive. It would be fairly small and microdrives come in 340 MByte to 1 GByte sizes, with larger ones on the way. The down side is limited battery life--the microdrive uses up a fair amount of power when spinning. On the other hand, you could read and buffer many megabytes of date so the disk could be on standby most of the time.
The iPaq is a very nice Squeak machine for deployment. The small screen and lack of a keyboard makes it inefficient for programming. I run MVC; Morphic is not well suited to touchscreens.
-- John
At 10:41 PM -0400 9/6/01, Stephen Pair wrote:
I'm sure many people on this list have seen the relatively recent HDD based MP3 players that have come into the market (if not: http://www.pjbox.com).
What strikes me as incredible is that there hasn't appeared an entry in the PDA market based on this concept (that I know of). I would love to have a device that has 20GB of secondary storage that fits into a shirt pocket. I would love it even more if it ran Squeak (of course) and could:
- become the computational engine (or just storage) for your home
entertainment system (with that much storage you could store a good bit of video, mp3s, video games, etc)
- interface with a automobile computer system
- serve all the traditional PDA functions
- interface with your home network (and automatically back itself up
overnight)
- plug into a desktop or laptop form factor as it's computational engine
(or it's storage)
- interface with a home and cellular wireless network
Does anyone know of such a device? Seems like it could be a huge market. Current PDAs are too limited in terms of storage capacity and it's a pain to keep them in sync. The current devices only have about 12MB of DRAM, but I would imagine you could build something with 256MB of DRAM or more and still keep it small.
- Stephen
I think the iPAQ is a decent machine for normal Squeak development...
John Maloney writes:
The iPaq is a very nice Squeak machine for deployment. The small screen and lack of a keyboard makes it inefficient for programming.
I use a Stowaway folding keyboard; I like it better than most laptop keyboards I've used.
Tim Rowledge writes:
My 200MHz StrongARM... is useless for Morphic.
How do you quantify that? (menu latency, etc.) Morphic on a 206MHz iPAQ seems tolerable to me.
With regard to secondary storage... I'm using a 2G PCMCIA hard drive at the moment. It's 0.5W at 3.3V, and has a fairly aggressive spindown policy; I get about eight hours using the machine between charges. If CF had been as cheap as it is now a few months ago, I probably would have gone that way. As it is, I like the faster burst transfer rate and larger capacity (mainly for video).
-C
-- Craig Latta composer and computer scientist craig.latta@netjam.org www.netjam.org crl@watson.ibm.com Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]
Craig Latta Craig.Latta@NetJam.ORG is widely believed to have written:
Tim Rowledge writes:
My 200MHz StrongARM... is useless for Morphic.
How do you quantify that? (menu latency, etc.) Morphic on a 206MHz iPAQ seems tolerable to me.
Try it out on that Acorn you have sitting in your pile; you'll soon understand! I suspect (with little good evidence right now) that it is primarily event handling problems along with the shear mips-consumption of the code. Remember, that Acorns have a memory bus with about 20% the capacity of the newer ARM machines. That's what I get for having a six year old machine!
Interestingly, there is an upgrade that provides a fast memory bus and SDRAM on the same card as the cpu (thus bypassing the damp string memory bus of the main board) which runs the GreenBook benchmarks nearly _three_ times as fast. As a nice warning about the value of benchmarks, the 0 tinyBenchmarks figure is barely 20% better.... I'm hoping that by the time the new machines arrive (ie XScale, fast bus etc) I might be able to afford one.
tim
Just barely on topic:- http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6770596476.html yet another strongarm linux device, but maybe this one wil actually become available in a timely manner?
tim
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