Hi all,
I thought I'd break the silence on this new board with a few notes about the empeg hardware for the geeky types - most of this info is on www.empeg.com already, but it's not exactly a discussion forum :)

The processor is the Intel SA1100, in 208-pin quadflatpack. We went for the fastest one we could get (because we're like that, not because it needs the power... yet, anyway) which is the -DA variant - 2.0v core voltage, and 221.something Mhz. It's like the SA110 except it has half the D-cache size (8k as opposed to 16k), and has lots of froody stuff onboard, inc loads of serials, plenty of I/O, that sort of thing. It's got 8Mb of FP-DRAM, and 1Mb of flash ROM, which is where the booter, upgrader, and kernel live. You'll be glad to know that the upgrader sits in a write-protected area of flash which means that in theory you can never trash the unit to the point of no return, no matter what you manage to put in the writable area of the flash.

Also on the main board is the Philips 7705 DSP, which does FM stereo separation, RDS extraction, and lots of cool sound processing stuff - loudness, fading, treble, bass, and 2x 10-band parametric EQ - all digitally.

On the front board we have a couple of PICs - one deals with the buttons, the other deals with tweaking of display refresh timings. In standby mode it also fiddles with the standby LED, meaning it can just be boring and stay on, or pulsate attractively in a fashion which we all think looks like "you have mail". Ok, someone fire up a PPP link and make it so ;)

So, 4 CPU's. More than enough for the job in hand...

Hugo

Hi-
SA1100 is a lovely beast, but a question- how much power do you find you're
having to supply on the core rail? My datasheet shows a suspicious 160mA for
the 160MHz part and 220mA for the 220MHz - I've not yet hassled Intel about
it, but my boards seem to take rather more than this.
More nosey questions- do you bring out the LCD pins to a header? Do you run
the kernel from Rom permanently, or just during boot?
If you've implemented a LED throbber, that'll be the first one I've seen
on a product that wasn't mine. Damn, there goes that trademark feature.
(Did your CPU count (4) miss out the remote on purpose, or is the remote
no longer a feature?)

Oh yes, one more thing. When's it coming? (repeat * 1000) *8-)

Steve

>You'll be glad to know that the upgrader sits in a write-protected area of >flash which means that in theory you can never trash the unit to the point of >no return, no matter what you manage to put in the writable area of the flash.

hmm... but in reality the upgrader doesnt work after a failed flashing progress :-(

bobo

Hi Hugo,

Did you develop the hardware yourself or is the main board based on an off the shelf design?

In either case, how much tweaking of the Linux OS was necessary? I understand there are companies which have developed an embedded version of Linux, did you use these or did you use the 'standard' version?

Jan

The hardware was developed totally by ourselves - there isn't a suitable off-the-shelf product.

The OS has been tweaked quite a bit, but we did it from the standard sources, not from any embedded version.

Hugo