My mini210S has arrived

My friendlyarm mini210S package arrived from andahammer a couple of days ago, unfortunately, I didn't get much sleep, so I didn't have a great deal of energy to do much with it except unpack all of the goodies in the box and power it on with the preloaded android 4 image.

A quick run through some of the goodies and there are some very interesting bits, the sdio breakouts look really cute, they fit on the mini210S sdio header, which just happens to have 3.3v, 5v, gnd, spi and i2c on it with a protoboard style which opens up a world of possibilities.

I got the cam130 module which fits into a dedicated cmos camera port, I'm looking forward to seeing what it can do in my astro projects, I think the cmos module on there might give me access to the 'frex' pin via the 2mm header block. 

I got the sdio wifi module with it's obvious benefits. I also got the comprehensive mini210S cable kit for every header on the board and there was also a good quality mini hdmi to hdmi cable :)

Charlie also very kindly chucked in some free goodies, some poe kit, a tiny usb wifi adapter, a nice clear breadboard and a handful of jumper wires, Thanks Charlie!!

So with anticipation I plugged the power supply into the mini2010S, checked that it was in nand boot mode and flipped the power switch, the first thing I noticed is that I didn't have to fish around for jumpers, it might seem daft but little things like switches for boot mode settings are a refreshing change :)

I have zero experience with android, so as far as boot times go I have nothing similar to judge it against, it was around 20 or so seconds but either way, I wasn't annoyed by the wait.  Once the gui is up and running, the mini210S is nice and responsive, flipping through the menus is a pleasant experience, with a mixture of touchscreen and the 4 side buttons to help you navigate, it is a resistive touch screen so there are no gestures/multitouch but it's been as good as other resistive touchscreen devices I've used.

There are plenty of apps. preloaded but for now I settled for trying the iTest app first, testing the leds, pwm buzzer and adc, as expected they worked just fine, the led test app. allows you to turn the leds on and off independently of each other and the buzzer app allows you to set the pwm speed and hear it through the buzzer, no shock there then!

the A/D Convert test shows the value of the ADC pin that is connected to a small blue pot, which is nestled between the buzzer and the back of the ethernet socket, if you adjust the pot with a screwdriver you can see the adc value change on screen, unfortunately there appears to be a glitch in the display side of the software as it's not rendering the bottom 1/2 of the numbers but you can clearly see that the adc is working as expected.

I also tested out the sdio wifi module, unfortunately there doesn't appear to be an app. store icon/app installed on the mini210S so I couldn't go and test bbc iplayer etc. but browsing the bbc website was simple enough and youtube worked just fine too :)  I tested the music player and got very decent quality audio from the headphone socket.

The video player appears to want mp4/aac encoded video, so a quick re-encode of some video with my cuda enabled graphics card and a few minutes later I was watching video on the mini210S, I had to access the video via the 'es file browser' app but once you click on it you get the option of using the es video player or the gallery software, either is capable of playing the video and does it well.

Last thing I tested was the cam130 cmos camera module, as previously mentioned, it fits onto a dedicated cmos camera socket on the mini210S, in android there is a simple camera application that allows you to take snapshots or record video, the software starts up quickly and presents you with a picture.  There are the usual settings buttons which allow you to change exposure, brightness, mode etc. as well as a set of buttons to allow you to swap between camera/video modes and a third mode that I haven't quite worked out yet :)

So that's my initial experience of the mini210S and android, I'm really happy with the potential of the mini210S, the onboard android image has enough software on it to give you a very reasonable media experience out of the box, I forgot to mention that you can also connect it to a hdtv, for a device that has been built for developers, it's a great little media centre which just adds more power to your elbow :)

I can't wait to get linux onto it now and start developing, the mini210S has shown itself as being a very capable device just from me messing around in the stock android and I've barely scratched the surface, I have a feeling that it's just going to get better and better once I start developing on it :)

Hot Pi!

It turns out that the raspberry pi has hit another hardware snag, with a forum post outlining the issue here: Fixing 1.8V power rail design error  Essentially, there is a 1.8v filter pin on the ethernet/usb chip that has actually ended up being connected to the 1.8v rail, this can cause the ethernet chip to supply power to the whole 1.8v rail instead of the linear regulator that is supposed to be doing the job, this in turn makes the ethernet run hot.

Not a complete show stopper but could certainly be compounding issues that are prevalent in the current usb drivers, current work on the usb drivers and possible fixes are being discussed here.

Unfortunately, the usb fixes have not fixed the issues I am having with my webcam, luckily I have the mini210S coming to experiment with.

Clearing the decks for the min210S

So it looks like I'm getting a mini210S, in honour of the fact, I decided to clear some bench space for it.  Not sure about anyone else but my computer desk is a mixture of computers and random circuits/electronics all vying for the same desktop space, it's a bit like the penny falls machines in the arcades, eventually, stuff makes its way to the back of the desk and falls off. 

I've been slowly tidying my desk over the last few weeks, lots of sets of plastic drawers etc. for the random stuff I collect/use.  After all the tidying, I now have a reasonable 12-18" sq. area of space that should do just nicely for the 210S and any associated circuits that are bound to build up around it!

Mini210S

In my introduction I mentioned that I'd been looking at the mini210S, after my raspberry pi experience, I feel like I needed a full arm dev board, it's a logical progression really, from hacking arm devices, to a small dev board, to a full board.  I've often looked at the mini2440/6410 etc. range of arm boards, they always impressed me as looking like very neat devices, well presented board designs with ports everywhere and some nice looking addon screens, however the price put me off.

I spoke to a friend recently about the way forward and he informed me about the forthcoming mini210S release.  As you can see, it's a very well featured device, it comes with an arm cortex a8 @ 1Ghz, 512MB of ram and 4gb of nand, a huge list of features and more IO connectors than you could shake a stick at.  Very interesting indeed!

Mixed feelings...

As I mentioned in my intro, I have hacked/developed on the didj/df3120 arm boards, they are fantastic little units for cutting your teeth with hacking and linux development but sometimes you just want something that hasn't had it's pins purposed by someone else.

So recently I have been messing around with the raspberry pi, I have mixed feelings about the Pi, it's an arm11 clocked at 700Mhz default, 256MB ram with a custom broadcom gpu (opengl ES 2.0 3d).

It's definitely fulfilled the cheap niche, you can undoubtedly program on it so it fulfills the foundations aims.  My pi board worked great right out of the box, my son's pi needed the crystal for the smsc ethernet/usb chip reflowing before the usb would work. 

Power is finicky on the pi, you have to find the right combo of psu and powered usb hub, even then you may or may not get a specific usb device to work, experimentation is key.  Don't get me wrong, I like the pi, I was aware of quite a few of the caveats before I purchased it, so some of these issues are to be expected and I have learnt a few things on the way but right now the specific project I wanted the pi for (apart from tinkering) has stalled, hence the mixed feelings.  I really need to bite the bullet and look at a full blown arm dev board.

I guess I should intoduce myself?

Hi, My name is Reggie, I'll get the namebadge made up later if that's ok?  I am a tinkerer/hacker with embedded devices (atmel and arm), this will be my space to document some of the stuff I mess around with.  I have developed software for the leapfrog didj/explorer consoles, hacks with the parrot df3120 photoframe and more recently I have been messing around with the raspberry pi, I am currently looking at a mini210S but I'll talk more about all of those in future posts.