Technologics TS-7260

I ended up purchasing a technologic TS-7260 board. Specs:

# 200Mhz ARM9 CPU with MMU
# 32 MB SDRAM (64-128 MB optional)
# < 1 watt for full-speed operation
# 1/4 watt at lower speeds
# High efficiency switching-mode power supply (4.5-20VDC Unregulated Input)
# 32 MB on-board NAND flash drive
# Standard TS-XDIO*
# Optional SD Card socket*
# Optional 2 extra TTL serial ports*
# 2 USB 2.0 Compatible OHCI ports (12 Mbit/s Max)
# 10/100 Ethernet port
# 30 total DIO pins
# 3 standard COM ports
# Watchdog timer
# 2-channel on-board 12-bit A/D Converter



Some tips:

Make sure that minicom has no flow control at all enabled (hardware or otherwise). Otherwise, it is not possible to interrupt the reboot loader to change the IP address of the board.

While redboot as shipped did not support DHCP, booting from flash it does not matter, and you can edit /etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-eth0 to look like this to get an IP address via DHCP:

DEVICE=eth0
IPADDR=192.168.1.117
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK=192.168.1.0
BROADCAST=192.168.1.255
#BOOTPROTO=static
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ENABLE=yes

(The IP addresses are not important, commenting out the BOOTPROTO=static line and uncommenting the BOOTPROTO=dhcp line is).

Apache works as advertised. php doesn't seem to be there, but I can deal with that later.

First thing I want to do is get a webcam running. I noticed there was no /dev/usb (or anything similar). As a first step, after looking around the filesystem, I added the following lines to the bottom of /etc/rc.d/rcS.sysinit:

#insmod the usb support

/usr/bin/loadUSBModules.sh

However, this seemed not to be a good idea; could not mount the 256MB dev env flash drive that came with the box. So, undid that line, and rebooted -- then, after booting, as able to run the above script and then:

/usr/bin/loadUSB.sh

to access the flash drive.

Next, I inserted a webcam. USB system recognized the insertion of a device, but no driver claimed the USB webcam, so probably the first thing that I will need to do is hunt down a USB webcam driver. Or write one :-) A potential starting point is at http://mxhaard.free.fr/embedded.html, using the spca5xx/LE driver. Or here: http://qce-ga.sourceforge.net/

On the way -- a PC-104 battery for the SBC, a USB wireless card (for now, wired ethernet is fine), and some mounting hardware so I can mount the SBC to the VEX robot.