Black Mesa East » Electronics

Sarge SBC in electronic magazine

mcgregor — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:16:32 +0000

Long time has passed since I wrote a post. This is how the things are going when you don’t have time at all – but still I’m proud to announce that there has been published an article in polish electronics related magazine “Elektronika Praktyczna” about Sarge SBC and running linux on it.

Extension board

mcgregor — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:03:33 +0000

Our current work is focus on the Sarge Extension Board design. The board will contain few additional periferials like I2S sound DAC and CompactFlash connector and these will allow us to extend our capabilities in the embedded system field.

AT91RM9200 fully I2C bus functional

mcgregor — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:23:54 +0000

There are dozens of chips using I2C (Inter-IC bus) bus. The AT91RM9200 chip used
in The Sarge SBC project has embedded I2C master controller. Initially I’ve experienced some problems using the bus, but it was hardware/design problem. Now the I2C is fully functional and can be used very easly under linux with applications like lm-sensors. Adding various chips we can read the temperature, pressure, humidity, time etc.
Just for test I have connected DS1621 chip to the board and was able to read the temperature.

Sarge SBC is playing sound via a2dp

mcgregor — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:34:54 +0000

Our last efforts, the long hours spent deep underground in Black Mesa compound
brought the Sarge SBC to the point where the sound becomes blue and radio-wave.

… more

Sarge SBC ver 1.0 released

mcgregor — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:18:10 +0000

Few hours ago our staff released the Sarge SBC ver 1.0.
The SBC provides basic linux functionality like

ethernet networking,
SD/MMC card storage,
USB host
extension connectors: serial ports, SPI, I2C, I2S, CF

An actually working STE100P kernel module

mcgregor — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:12:57 +0000

Since the Sarge SBC is able to boot the linux kernel again We took another step and
developed STE100P PHY kernel module – it’s working and the lights are blinking …

Debugging sarge with openmoko debug board

mcgregor — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:57:40 +0000

Yesterday I had a meeting with my friend Marcin Juszkiewicz (a.k.a Hrw) .

Beign an openmoko developer has many advantages such as access to JTAG debug

board shipped together with Neo1973. Thanks to Marcin’s courtesy I was able to

borrow it for a few days. Using arm-linux-gdb together with OpenOCD debugger

and JTAG debug board I’ll be able to find out why the latest linux kernels won’t boot on Sarge.

OpenMoko debug board:

For debugging I’m using the Non-Neo1973 JTAG connector.

It’s pinout on the picture below looks similiar to JTAG connectors that

I’ve seen in many electronics diagrams.

It’s time for JTAG debugger

mcgregor — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:02:43 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make the kernel booting again.

Debugging low level linux kernel booting routines can be a real pain if the only output is a serial console which actually doesn’t work a the moment of boot. I bought online a JTAG debugger and waiting for shipment. It should arrive tomorrow.

My hat ran ouf of rabbits

mcgregor — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 07:12:42 +0000

Durring last few weeks I’ve tried to bring the 2.6.17 kernel back to run – with no success. Why isn’t it booting anymore ? – read more …

Sarge is booting linux kernel

mcgregor — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:05:00 +0000

Today our staff managed to boot linux kernel (2.6.17-14) on The Sarge SBC.

After few days of hard work We have finally positive results – see more…