It’s time to create a new category in my projects blog: embedded.

I got interested in microcontrollers some years ago and wrote something simple for 16F88 with assembler. Then I connected it to an old IPAQ using a serial connection. But the IPAQ isn’t a very good development platform so now I decided to buy a gumstix.

It’s 400Mhz verdex mainboard with 64M RAM and 16M flash. And a bluetooth. The mainboard is the smaller board upside down in the picture. The bigger board is a expansion board including 3x rs232, power plug, a USB mini-B connector and a bunch of GPIO lines.

The bootloader is U-Boot and the Linux distribution is based on OpenEmbedded. U-Boot is nice as I’m somewhat familiar with it but the OE I’m going to replace with something else.

I just booted it up to see how it looks inside:


cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : XScale-PXA270 rev 7 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 415.33
Features : swp half thumb fastmult edsp iwmmxt
CPU implementer : 0x69
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0x411
CPU revision : 7
Hardware : The Gumstix Platform


Maybe the first thing would be to configure the kernel to support only those features included in my hardware setup.