Sponsored By
Efika 5200B Project
application ports and testsin category Applications & Software
proposed by punky on 11th April 2006 (accepted on 7th October 2006)
Project Summary
My project is to create ports of student projects on the PPC platform. These applications include some matricial computation,an equation solver, a raytracer and a meteorological medium generator, all made during my computing studies.After that, my goal is to create comparisons for a study project between the platform x86 and PPC to perform these computations. The tests would include running the applications on the same linux distribution but different hardware, trying different distributions and testing the programs on different operating systems like MorphOS.
Project Blog Entries
I Just finished my efika case, now ready to work. I used an old cd-rom drive as a case, there is a sliding system to open it. The case include some wood for the front panel, plastic for the rear and 2 screws keeping the case closed. My config is a 20gb toshiba hd, ati 9250 low-profile and a picoPSU 60W wide-input. The picoPSU really helped a lot to make the system small !
The front, with 2 switchs ands 2 leds :
And the back :
Looks really hand-made, but i like it. Specially because the entire computer fits into a cd-rom drive :)
Now it's time to make a fresh install and do some hard testing!
As EFIKA project is going to start, i'm currently preparing for my project . First, i'm cleaning the source code of the small applications i want to port, adding open source tags in it and looking for small bugs to correct.
This project is also a good time to learn how power architecture works. I'm looking at all the documentation available to see what are the differences with my actual x86 architecture. I always liked reading technical designs, and this project is the perfect time to have an overview of a power processor.
While i was looking for hardware for the EFIKA motherboard, i got the idea to search for a graphic card with TV-OUT capabilities. I fought that with usb ports available on the motherboard, i would be able to plug a simple usb gamepad. This would make a funny game platform to work with. I already worked with the sdl library which is available for a variety of systems and with gamepad and great graphic support, it may be possible to build fun video games.
Many ideas for EFIKA usage, that was the idea of the project and it's definitely working; see you soon EFIKA developers !