Hardware components

[Ralph Siemsen]

Hi Peter,

On Wed, Mar 02, 2011 at 05:38:53PM +1030, Koz wrote:
> 
> I know that this information will exist somewhere. If someone could
> give me some directions to lists etc I would be
> grateful. Who might have this info?

A listing was compiled a long time ago:
http://netwinder.osuosl.org/users/n/nelson/public_html/specs.html

Many of the links are probably broken, unfortunately, due to age.
We have copies of some of the documents on the website:
http://netwinder.osuosl.org/pub/netwinder/docs/

> At this stage I don't want to open up the box etc, etc.

I would suggest you start with one of the following options.
Both are described in the Firmware-HOWTO on www.netwinder.org
- use TFTP to load your custom code and run it (section 2.8),or
- use serial bootstrap to load your code (section 3.7)

This will give you full control over the hardware - unlike a PC,
there are no "BIOS Calls" on the netwinder.  Once your code is loaded,
the firmware is not active anymore.  Just use it to help you get
started.  Once you have gained experience controlling the hardware,
you can think about replacing the bootloader as well.

> I am not a unix programmer. I program at a machine code level so I
> need to access this box's hardware directly.
> I need to avoid unix altogether but I need to be able to compile to
> it and boot it.

The CPU in the Netwinder is a StrongARM, a member of the ARM family.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture for a good overview.
You'll need a compiler and/or assembler that can generate code for
this processor.  There are many possible choices here, depending on
what environment you work in.  Pre-build toolchains from Codesourcery
are one possibility.

Regards,
-Ralph