Hi Andrius I've found a ready-made Atmel board that does everything we want. It's by Calao Systems...

http://www.calao-systems.com/index.php?lng=en

This board is based on the AT91SAM9260, an almost identical processor to the 9261 in the same family, with an Ethernet interface, but no built-in LCD Controller. It would be useful if we ever wanted to connnect to an Ethernet Router or WiFi/Ethernet Router.

http://www.calao-systems.com/products/usb-a9260/FP USB-A9260 V11.pdf

The board is on special offer at about $200. That would still be expernsive for people in Africa, but the idea is just to see what a professionally-made board would be like, if we produced something very similar ourselves. It would help us to see how complex the PCB is, how many support chips and resistor/capacitors/connectors are needed.

It's an odd shape if you look at the photo in the pdf, as it's designed to plug into a USB Port during development.

As I said, there's no LCD Controller, but we could test it with an external USB VGA adaptor and LCD Monitor. We would need to make sure there is a Linux driver, with C source-code so we can compile it for the AT91SAM9260.

We may find some other display option. It has a 50 pin expansion connector, which I think brings out an SPI interface, allowing us to control an intelligent SPI-interface LCD Module, if we want.

If you aren't familiar with SPI (I wasn't), then here's a Wikipedia article. It's a 4 wire master/slave thing, mostly for linking chips and modules within a piece of equipment...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Peripheral_Interface_Bus

It comes with Linux 2.6, so we can try it with a Hello World program or text-editor.

The chances are, there are some similar boards around if we look hard enough, perhaps cheaper and for the 9261 with LCD Controller.

Ricardo

AboutThisPage

• FlashDriveEditor=Atmel boards are a leading choice for us.
• FlashDriveEditorTask=Purchase Atmel boards and experiment with them.