intel Xscale PXA270 or StrongArm: any dev board?

[DiTBho]

I am developing stuff for the Zaurus SL-C3xxx line, which is based on PXA270.

Unfortnately Sharp made a terrible firmware, interfaces written in Japanese, (after 20 years, still) incomprehensible flash partitions, unknown checksum, only 1.2Mbyte for the bootloader, and a lot of other very annoying stuff to develop.

Not to mention all the mess they made with the voltage regulators, the part of the circuitry that recharges the battery, and the GPIOs
Just to name one: if the microdrive breaks on C3000/C3100/C3200, the firmware won't let you do any updates until you replace the unit

What?!?  does updating the boot partition of the flash have to do with the microdrive? ...

Just to name another, if you don't connect the power cable correctly, and it stays on battery, there are circuits that need special setup, to be done with GPIO lines, and if you don't do it correctly, your PDA will suddenly turn off.
(with a good chance of filesystem curruption)

In short, it's not at all the ideal situation to develop the linux kernel, nor your own bootloader, even working with uboot is very annoying.

It would be much more convenient to have a clean development board, without these annoyances introduced by Sharp.


What can I search on eBay/similar?

[DiTBho]

armv5tel <------- xscale
armv4el <------- StrongArm

[squadchannel]

it would be quicker to keep the body, display and keyboard and replace them with a RaspberryPi.

[langwadt]

it would be quicker to keep the body, display and keyboard and replace them with a RaspberryPi.

how about replace all of it?

[squadchannel]

  but 

[DiTBho]

if I wanted to use an rpi (whose core is >> Arm-v5) I wouldn't have opened the topic about Xscale 

[coromonadalix]

you have or had,  some are obsolete ?  on some you had schematics of their dev boards,  software side     idk

https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules/colibri-arm-family/intel-marvell-xscale-pxa270
https://developer.toradex.com/hardware/legacy-products/colibri-som-family/colibri-pxa270/
https://www.e-consystems.com/regulus.asp
https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/beacon-embeddedworks/SDK-PXA270-520-10-6432R/1236364
https://www.voipac.com/pxa270-dimm-base-board

i did saw Phytec on some of the boards we had

and some googlefuu reports the same links  or pdf docs ??

good luck

[djsb]

I have one of those Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100 devices, no dev board though. You might have to design one from scratch, similarly to the way that the Pocket386 and weecee were done (x86 based on industrial modules). More info here https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=99751&hilit=pocket386
They also discuss using dosbox with the Zaurus elsewhere on the forum.

[DiTBho]

I have one of those Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100 devices

I know the Zaurus C1K and 3K hw very well, that's the target I am developing for.
There's very little interest, I post every now and then here.

I'm developing a much more flexible bootloader than anything I've seen in the past.
One of the things I really miss about the Zaurus is the ability to use a hardware debugger.
There seem to be JTAG signals, but I don't know anything about them.

That's why I am looking for a dev-board.

[Njk]

Palm Tungsten T3

[DiTBho]

Palm Tungsten T3

is there a way to take the control and reprogram the flash?

[Njk]

is there a way to take the control and reprogram the flash?

There were software tools like JackSprat and JackFlash specifically for flash data manipulation, AFAIR

BTW, the T3 internals: https://www.pspilot.de/ppptun3/ppptun3.html
Actually, it uses PXA260, not exactly PXA270

[DiTBho]

is there a way to take the control and reprogram the flash?

There were software tools like JackSprat and JackFlash specifically for flash data manipulation, AFAIR

BTW, the T3 internals: https://www.pspilot.de/ppptun3/ppptun3.html
Actually, it uses PXA260, not exactly PXA270

Thanks! Super useful!
=)