Summer has come for some of us and it's time for holidays but you don't want to leave your beloved EFIKA. ;-)

Here is the solution, a portable EFIKA. I finally put a 7 inches WVGA (800*480) display on an OpenClient (thanks again Genesi) and get the first "almost" portable EFIKA prototype.

It uses a Radeon 9250 (the XGI gfx could be supported in a near future) and the DVI-D signal is sent to the panel through the I/F I've previously designed. This is now a really nice piece of hardware which runs the latest 2.6.22-rc6 linux kernel (patched for the EFIKA).

Better than many words, a small video: eclipsis_00.mp4.

This video shows successively the boot process, a curses game example, a DirectFB demo and finally X11 with OpenGL support.

Just below: selected pictures of the system.



Complete system.



Behind the scene.



X11 + openGL.

On the technical side, a preliminary version of the DVI I/F schematics is now available.

• dvi_lite_0705_01_prelim_00.pdf
  
• dvi_lite_0705_01_prelim_01.pdf
  

The I2C DDC memory (EDID) can now be programmed under linux with the eeprog utility through the DVI connector.

As usual, you can find all the details on my website.

Last point, I started a small "subproject" which aims to design an external power management module for the EFIKA. This module will also include sensors (temperature, humidity...) for home automation applications.
Based on a FPGA containing a 32bits NIOSII softcore, this small system will act as an intelligent supervisor for the EFIKA. The code will be based on the U-Boot loader (init + exceptions handling).

The cross-compilation toolchain (binutils, gcc & newlib) runs on the EFIKA (30 hours of compilation from source to set it up).

Nevertheless this is a "backgrounding task" for me, so do not expect major progress before a while. The priority remains the portable EFIKA.

Picture of the module (FPGA system & a DS1305 RTC).



Progress of the day, the lowest level functions of u-boot are now running ;-)



Nice, but many things remain to do...

Stellae