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by Wolf Paulus.
Original Post: HomePot Pt.2
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Playing around with the HomePod for a while was fun. We installed the GLOO media server on all PCs and Macs in my house and every machine basically became a GLOO radio station. Still, I think that there are better (less expensive) ways to get your stereo play the MP3 files stored on your computer and since the build in FM tuner has the worst reception one can possibly image, it's not even usable as a plain old radio.
The HomePod on the other hand is a quite powerful little machine. And rightfully, Toshiba, for its TX4926 64-bit microprocessor in the HomePod, just won Best of Show - Consumer Electronics at the 2004 Embedded Systems Conference (ESC).
Here again are some of its hardware features:
* Toshiba TX4926 200MHz CPU
* 16MB Flash RAM, 32MB SDRAM
* 802.11b 11Mbps mini-PCI Card with external antenna
* RJ-45 10/100Base-T Ethernet Port
* USB port, host-powered
* 124x64pixel back-lit blue LCD display
Since the documentation is everything but extensive, it takes some curiosity and time to find out about some of the software secrets.
Here is what I have learned so far.
* The HomePod runs Linux version 2.4.18 (gcc version 3.0.4).
* An EPSON SED1565 LCD Controller Driver Version 1.0.0 is used.
* A ramdisk driver initializes a RAM-Disks of 2048K size (1024 blocksize).
The tiny BusyBox shell is installed and is launched when you Telnet into the device.
BusyBox v1.00-pre3 (2003.09.26-05:30+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
#
Following the MIPS little endian path all the way down, one can find IBM's J9 Java Virual Machine /mipsle/ive/bin/j9
J9 - VM for the Java(TM) platform, Version 2.1
(c) Copyright IBM Corp. 1991, 2003 All Rights Reserved
Target: 20030708 (Linux 2.4.18 Unknown)
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