Cambridge, England — (press release excerpt) — Going beyond their previous announcement, Aleph One Ltd of Cambridge, England and Remote 12 Systems Ltd of London, England are now able to supply both LART and KSB boards, plus a User Guide, software, and cables. Previously, only the main LART board and its associated cables, software, and documentation were offered.

These ARM-powered boards are part of a group of boards with many I/O functions and specialities, building on the basic LART, which have been developed under the leadership of Jan-Derk Bakker, and made public as Open Hardware by Dr. Bakker and colleagues at the Technical University in Delft, Netherlands.

The boards make a small (75x100mm), light, low-powered platform for developing wearable computers, robot controllers, process controllers, in-car infotainment systems and many other applications using the huge body of Open-Source Linux software, and software developers, around the world. They will be of interest to all who see the attractions of developing applications for the high-performance low-power ARM and Intel StrongARM processors.

The fundamental LART board has a 190MHz Intel StrongARM 1100 processor, 32MB of EDO RAM and 4MB of Flash RAM, and even with its KSB daughter consumes only about one Watt to achieve about 200MIPS. The Flash RAM is sufficient for a bootloader, a compressed kernel and a compressed ramdisk, and Aleph One provides software to allow ARMLinux to boot from it. Most of the signals from the SA-1100 appear at external connectors. One has the 32-bit Data bus and 26 Address lines, and can handle 400MB/s. Another handles most GP I/O pins and enough Data/Address lines to implement peripherals based on PCMCIA or ISA standards, so that a simple PCB for a specific task can be attached, such as one for robotics or process control. A Serial connector provides a pair of RS232 links, and a JTAG connector allows the on-board Flash RAM to be programmed. The on-board power supply accepts 3.5 to 10V DC and can provide up to 15W to peripheral or attached boards.

The KSB board plugs onto LART and provides: IDE/ATA interface (44 pins on 2mm centers); stereo 16-bit 44KHz audio output at line and headphone levels; PS/2 connections for mouse and keyboard; mono audio I/O, POTS and ADC fron a UCB 1200chip; connectors for IrDA, USB Client, video, and touchscreen. PLDs on the board provide a set of reconfigurable I/O functions.

The next boards which will become available for use with the combination of the LART and the KSB will provide either one or four 10baseT Ethernet connections.

The full “open source” design package for the LART and KSB is available for download from the LART website, where further specifications and other details can also be found.

 
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