I just spent a couple of days at this year's Applied Computing Conference, held in San Jose, CA. New this year, were several presentations on embedded Linux (see below *). But beyond that not-so-surprising occurrence, there were two things — one very large, and one very small — that REALLY caught my attention . . .

Thing 1: the GIANT PENGUIN — I've got to say, the most memorable moment of the conference (for me, at least) was stepping into the exhibit hall and seeing an enormous blow-up Tux hovering above MontaVista's booth. Yes, folks, Linux has certainly arrived in the embedded systems market! Just so you don't think I'm making this up, here's a picture of what may well be the world's largest Penguin — shown with its father, MontaVista founder Jim Ready:

Thing 2: the TEENY WEENY WEBSERVER — as if to balance the image of the GIANT PENGUIN, and practically sitting in its shadow, was the most amazingly small single-board webserver. It's called the “CerfBoard-SA 1110 for Linux”, it's made by Intrinsyc, and it looks like this:

This little gem is really really tiny — measuring a mere 2.24 x 2.36 in. (57 x 60 mm)! Still, through the modern miracle of system-on-chip technology (thank you, Intel) it includes more than enough electronics to boot up and function as a Linux based webserver. Somehow, Intrinsyc managed to pack all this into that minuscule design: 133 or 206 MHz Intel StrongARM 1110 CPU, up to 16M Flash, up to 8M SDRAM, 16 digital I/O lines, 10BaseT Ethernet, USB Type B port, 3 2-wire RS232 ports, a built-in CompactFlash+ socket, and an audio CODEC and LCD interface that require a few external chips for actual use in a system. By the way, don't be fooled by the word “Flash” in “CompactFlash+”; the “+” means it's really a full PCMCIA (PC Card) interface in disguise, and can be used with many types of function cards that support the new version of the CF standard. Intrinsyc supports the tiny webserver with a customized port of embedded Linux. For more information visit Intrinsyc's web site at www.intrinsyc.com.

Related stories:
* Applied Computing Conference to feature Linux talks
StrongARM-based Embedded Linux reference platform

 
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