What we want to produce is a small, cheap and power efficient arm machine that can connect to a standard tv set or vga computer screen because in southamerican countries these are cheap and easy to find second hand, also if you import it like one computer you do not need to pay tax. The machine also must support android system (easy to find educational software and games), flash player (for online games and video), linux as option, must have LAN port and also wifi (when you buy internet access the router is free, also the wifi board only add 2 usd ), at least have 2 usb ports, optional support for usb gamepads and webcams.

• 4-port usb hub ($1 appx)
• Power Regulator IC (5v, 3A) ($0.30 appx)
• LDO IC (3.3v, 0.5A) ($0.20 appx)
• usb jumper to a wifi module ($0.05? appx)
• 24-pin RGB/TTL to Composite http://www.chrontel.com/products/7015.htm ($1 appx)
• something for Audio out (STM32F?) ($1.50 appx)
• an i2c eeprom identifying the I/O board (EOMA requirement) ($0.20 appx)
• 3 RCA for composite + stereo audio. ($0.20 appx)
• 2 (or 3) USB connector ($0.50 appx?)
• 5V power connector ($0.10 appx)
• internal connector for EOMA board ($1 appx)
• 4-layer PCB ($1.50 appx?)
• suitable case fitting the I/O board and EOMA module ($1.50 appx?)
• WIFI module ($2 appx?)
• Ethernet RJ45 Jack ($0.20?)
• Option for VGA (or DVI) use Chrontel or equiv
• Option for SATA-II (eSATA)

Total comes to about $12.25 very very approximate cost. NREs include appx $2,000 for the PCB tooling, and an unknown (but probably around $10,000) amount for casework tooling and development.

ADSL Router Concept

ADSL modem(s) (also might be nice to have the chance to do Annex B for germany, as well/instead), an Ethernet switch, and some form of wifi (with free software support for AP mode, and hopefully decent mesh abilities as well). I suppose some way of segregating the ports on the switch would be good too.

Investigation of options

ADSL2+ Chip: Infineon PSB 50610 E

A quick search for "ADSL2+ PCI card" came up with a potentially suitable chip. Further investigation of that chip shows that it's used in a GPL-compliant Belkin ADSL2+ / 802.11N WIFI Router.

• http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12181
• http://open-wrt.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?id=23652
• http://www.wikidevi.com/wiki/Belkin_F5D8233-4_v1

The only major piece of the missing puzzle, therefore, is how to get this PSB 50610 E connected to an EOMA-68 CPU card. USB? Ethernet? If Ethernet, that would mean having an on-board CPU, which probably means doing exactly the same circuit as already exists in the Belkin F5D8233!

FPGA card

• An EOMA-68 card which contains an FPGA rather than a CPU.

• All the EOMA-68 pins will be wired to the FPGA (depending on the capacity and capabilities of the FPGA chosen).

Uses

The CPU that can be built on an FPGA is unlikely to be as fast as a SoC, however it's a good target for designs.

Openness difficulties

• Ideally an FPGA would have a publicly described bitstream format, internal structure and have open source tools to program it; however I don't think there are any that meet those criteria ? (lkcl: there's one which i found when researching the zynq 7030, look it up on the arm-netbooks archives).

• We would want at least one that has free (as in chocolate) tools, that can run on a free (as in code) OS.

Penguin42

Customised PCB and Connector Assembly

It's also possible possible to have a 180 pin edge connector + two pcb guides and emi shield on card for mechanical sturdiness. It will also have benefit of being easy to produce. If there are so much concerns associated with pin count, it may be a solution.

Push pull edge connectors will have durability equal at least to USB pins. Female type connectors are available with different durability levels.

EMI shield stamping > http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/471801802/hot_stamping_shield.html

Solder on EMI shield are now a stock item in industry. They are damn cheap, even custom ones.

Laptop Ideas

• Notebook/netbook - modular design using existing tooling (with some minor mods) swappable cpu module, HD, mini-PCIe, LCD, etc The CPU module can jump from a mobile device to a desktop, to set-top-box to a Car-PC.

http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA-68/Laptop

Modular Servers

• 19in rack-mounted chassis for 8 or even 16 CPU cards, with a Gigabit Ethernet switch and front-loading hot-swappable eSATA drives (one per CPU card), maybe even a built-in load balancer on the Gigabit switch. power consumption would be ridiculously low, yet CPU horsepower ridiculously high. Cluster/blade/rack/backplane.

• Could easily fit 64 of those standing up, top to bottom, in a 19" rack; with shared /usr/ over the network. That would give ~3.75 gflops using ~300 watt. Another idea would be a dedicated disk-rack with one CPU card which slots in to a raid module, with space for 32 2.5" hard drives, standing up, top to bottom, with about 2gb/s aggregate throughput. Maybe both and a 10GigE switch could be put in one rack enclosure, as neither the CPU boards nor 2.5" hard drives are very deep. The entire combined rack would use only about 700 watt. The only major problem i see is cooling. An entire rack full of (24 of) those 2U enclosures would provide .09tflops and 50gb/s for 125K$. Was first of by a factor of 100 wrt flops, not as impressive now compared to a multi-gpu workhorse.

• 100 megabit switch chip RTL8309 http://realtek.info/pdf/rtl8309sb.pdf is available in quantity 1 for experimentation from future electronics. http://www.futureelectronics.com/en/Technologies/Product.aspx?ProductID=RTL8309SBLFREALTEKSEMICONDUCTOR7787054 capable of VLANs, 802.1q, and trunking two ports together.

I figure since HDMI is already listed as one of the features supported by the device, it would work better to go ahead and work on improving the device by making sure that HDMI Consumer Electronics Control ( CEC ) is added. This should work out fine since it's only connecting one pin on the HDMI port. As for the use of HDMI CEC it's a in-wire control system used to control devices like dvd/bluray players, televisions, cable set top boxes, sorround sound systems, and numerous other devices. There is already open source work on this using the Arduinoboard ( atmega series chip ) and the TI msp430 chip.

As for the hardware changes, this involves Pin 13 and 17 of the hdmi cable.

As for the library status, Currently a GPL v3 library exists for the TI MSP430 chip, and it can probably be modified to work on the allwinner chip.

Google Code: cec-arduino - Arduino library for communicating with HDMI CEC equipment

FreeDesktop.org - CEC repository- TI msp430 linux changes and CEC library

Wikipedia: HDMI - Details on the hdmi specification.

This would also make the chip ideal for use with XBMC for Home Theatre purposes. Currently an external dongle is required since very few GPUs support this natively see XBMC and HDMI-CEC