3 ms·
A few years ago I had the itch to do this and got as far as buying a hardware development kit one of the NXP LCP chips. They're low power ARM CPUs available in
by phaedrus 7y ago
A few years ago I had the itch to do this and got as far as buying a hardware development kit one of the NXP LCP chips. They're low power ARM CPUs available in LQFP form (so theoretically hand-solderable) and it should be not hard to port Rockbox to it.
I got overwhelmed at the prospect of starting the CAD schematic and layout for the project (I've done simple microcontroller boards in Eagle, but never one this complex). The daunting task was wiring up all the data and address lines for 2x large RAM chips and 2x Flash chips, and my ADHD kicked in, plus frustration at not being able to use programmer abstractions to do circuit CAD. I also kept not finding the time to port Rockbox on the hardware development kit.
Side note: there's giant hole in the market offerings for hobbyist single board computers. You have microcontrollers with KB's of RAM, and things like the Raspberry Pi with GB's of RAM, but there's nothing with ~16 MB of RAM and a low power 32-bit processor. The chips exist, just no one has created a cheap & compact hobbyist board (i.e. not a hw dev kit).
- duskwuff 7y ago> Side note: there's giant hole in the market offerings for hobbyist single board computers. ST's STM32 Discovery boards [1] fit that bill reasonably well. They're inexpensive (many under $20, most under $100), supported by an open toolchain (GCC / GDB / OpenOCD), and provide a wide variety of peripherals. Most parts don't have more than 1 or 2 MB of on-chip SRAM, but a decent number of their boards have 8 or 16 MB of external SDRAM. [1]: https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stm32-discovery-kits.html https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stm32-discovery-kits....