On ebay there’s a fancy S3C244-based board named mini 2440 with a 3.5″ touch LCD attached on sale for 85 USD. 64MB ram, 400MHz CPU, a nand flash and more. Lots of stuff for the money.
The guys in the lyre project seem to have adopted this as yet another hardware platform to attempt to run Rockbox on. After their Atmel AT91SAM target was ditched, they went the ARMopendous route and now this seems to have entered. This third hardware platform is called the Lyre prototype 2…
You should note that this Mini 2440 board has no batteries or anything and thus is not really meant to be a portable device in this shape.
“Bob” seems to have initial Rockbox code running on this device, and well-established Rockbox hackers JdGordon and domonoky have both ordered their own kits so the future looks bright.
Hi Daniel,
The ARMopendous hardware is suffering delays, so this “proto2” based on a commerical but cheap module was a stopgap. I didn’t quite expect it to get so much interest.
If ARMOpendous turns up, proto2 can remain as a DIY platform for Rockbox devs/hackers/modders. It would be hard to achieve such a low cost module with a low volume, and there seem to be lots of mini2440 hackers out there. I imagine the ARMopendous based player will be called proto3 or something.
ARMopendous would then become the preferred Mostly Open hardware platform. In the meantime we are gaining useful experience and it is helping to clarify some of the design ideas.
If ARMOpendous doesn’t turn up… plan B might be to migrate from proto2 to a partly then full Open target.
By the way, there are several suppliers of Mini2440 boards on the web, you might find one more local or with better support – unless you speak Chinese.
Thanks for these additional details and clarifications!
Hello Bagder 🙂
There is a blog post* showing Rockbox logo on Mini2440 LCD 🙂
* http://lyre.sourceforge.net/?q=content/news-lyre-mini2440-prototype
Rockbox firmware now runs, loaded by the bootloader 🙂 Here more info:
http://lyre.sourceforge.net/?q=content/mini2440-update
Now Kugel also bought the board 🙂
Kugel is another well-established Rockbox hacker 🙂