Report on investingation of Balloon3 feasability by prototyping using an Intel Mainstone pxa270 development board.

So far we can:

1) Build a custom bootloader (blob) and JFlash it in.
2) Build a 2.6.8.1-tcl1 kernel. This needed a fair bit of modifying as there was very meagre support, much brokenness and some things plain wrong. irq-pxa270 for example. See husaberg.toby-churchill.com/balloon/ for source just updated.
3) Mount skinny rootfs using jffs2.
4) Have audio in and out - plays mp3 files a treat. Sound quality is excellent.
5) Have an lcd panel login character terminal.
6) Have usb master which can:
   1) Add a usb keyboard for full LCD console.
   2) Add a usb CDROM/DVD drive
   3) Network via a USB to ethernet adaptor (2 brands tried)
   4) Plug in a current balloon using the balloon's usb slave and network to each other happily.
   5) Nearly mount usb mass storage devices - having some trouble with partitions.
7) Run ipkg in the usual way. Installs mc telnetd madplay ssh ... the usual (?Familiar) criminals.

Coming soon (but this may have to wait a bit):
PCMCIA (almost done)
RTC
MMC
Bluetooth via USB

Suspend/resume not yet tested.

Current consumption not assessed.

As previously stated, Loon3 using pxa270 seems to be a go-er.
Oh yes, its nice and fast too.

Nick

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Nick Bane
nick@cecomputing.co.uk
+44 (0)1954 719270