Hanover, Germany — (press release excerpt) — SSV Embedded Systems is announcing a new PC/104 Embedded Linux Starterkit. The single board computer (SBC) within this kit is the Am486DX5-based CP/486DX2 with 16 MB DRAM and 2 or 4M Flash memory. The SBC also offers 2 serial ports, IDE interface, keyboard and floppy interface, as well as an NE2000-compatible Ethernet 10Base-T port with 10 Mbit/s transfer… rate. The starterkit comes with a pre-installed Embedded Linux within the on-board Flash memory.

The Embedded Linux consists of three basic modules — the bootloader, the Linux kernel, and the root filesystem. The Linux kernel and the root filesystem are stored in a compressed binary form in the Flash memory. Immediately after a hardware reset, the bootloader moves the kernel from Flash to DRAM memory in a decompressed format and starts the kernel. Then the kernel decompresses the root filesystem from Flash to a RAM disk within DRAM. The Embedded Linux of the Starterkit comes with a Telnet server for remote login, an FTP server for Ethernet-based file transfer, and an HTTP (Web) server with CGI interface. With this configuration, it is possible to build a Web-based GUI interface. This GUI is then accessible from a PC or any other computer with a standard Web browser over a Ethernet-based network and over the Internet.

For high-volume embedded networking applications, SSV offers the basic architecture of the CP/486DX2 in a much smaller form factor. This ADNP/1486 micro module (82 x 33 mm) is based on a 32-bit low power AMD 486SX processor with 100 MHz, provides a complete embedded PC/AT architecture plus 16 MB DRAM and 2 or 4 MB Flash. Peripheral functions includes one serial port, 20 digital I/O lines and a 16-bit ISA expansion (similar to the PC/104 bus of the CP/486DX2) with programmable chip select lines. Also included is a 10Base-T Ethernet interface.

 
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