People might be more interested in hearing about things about PAL support, but I'll start from the Moon Cake Day anyway.

In a couple of days, it will be a traditional Chinese festival, Moon Festival or Mid August Day (it is mid August in Chinese calendar). Other than the usual Moon Cake and family get-together thing etc, Xiamen has a very special way of celebrating this holiday.

People call that 'Bo Bing'.

A group of people get together to throw 6 dices together in a bowel, whoever gets certain patterns (lack of the right words to describe this, but there are many different patterns to win a prize) wins certain prize. There are 6 levels awards depending on the pattern. The interesting part is that before the biggest winning pattern shows up, level 3, 4, and 5 award has to be surrendered to the next winner if there is one. Thus you never know what you'll get until the very last moment of the game!

Intial version OSD software with production/Beta/Gamma hardware (64MB SDRAM and 16MB FLASH) support is released here(all units from ThinkGeek are in this category). This release has stable A/V encoding and decoding support and many other new features, while there are a few known severe deficiencies and to-dos.



To upgrade, simply download the upk file into media card, then from OSD use 'File Browser' to find the downloaded file and click XIM, select 'Upgrade Software' to upgrade. After clicking, there might be a few seconds 'choke' (fixed in this release), then system will reboot and upgrade will automatically start.

As of yesterday, all OSD Hardware issues have been resolved and parts have shipped. Firmware now shows up on the critical path. So far the biggest problems are:



*Video Codec and framework stability (frequent crashes when playing and recording video) . Latest Codec and framework release from vendor is broken on Neuros HW. there is a mysterious video capture buffer over-run problem that is pending to be resolved. A newer release is supposed to come by 9/5.

*USB Host is still broken, fix should be available by 9/12 from vendor.

*SD card writing performance - still not able to record to SD Cards

Some plain yet interesting (or frustrating) experiences here,

Moved to a new house, installed DSL with a 5-year old SMC wireless router, two XP desktops and one XP laptop work just fine with DHCP enabled in router. Problem occurs when trying to hook my Linux laptop in.

No matter how hard I tried, DHCP or static IP, Linux box just refused to talk to the router, no DHCP request whatsoever, Network packet sniffer could not get any traffic out of Linux box. While dual boot in XP can work just fine with the same laptop, I started to suspect that my Linux box Ethernet driver got corrupted, by going through the airport security. Next time I'll hand carry the hard drive and patiently explain security guards that it is _just_ a HD, not a bomb. ;-(

Reports of being unable to update to 3.01-0.04 brought a deeper investigation of the problem, it turned out that due to a internal testing slip (used development environment to update instead of normal user mode), a HW dependency problem was neglected. From previous release, the best (or the worst) you can get is, successfully updated both packages and left with an OSD that can not respond to the remote control.

3.01-0.05 has been recreated based on 3.01-0.04 to resolve this issue, please follow the instructions included in the zip file to update.

Next version will be ready in a couple more days, however, updating to 3.01-0.05 is a _MUST_ before any update to future releases.

It's been a while since last software release, during past days, a lot of effort has been put on bring up OSD 'production' hardware and integrate 2.6.15 kernel. As you may know, 'production' hardware again will be updated from 32MB SDRAM/8MB FLASH to 64MB/16MB, but I believe the amount of effort to support that should be trivial.

So, version 3.01-0.04 should be our solid grow base.

With help from China team and developers from all over the world, this release has fixed several things of the BSP and integrated the lasted Codec releases, the main application now has playback and recording support. Although as a normal user/developer you won't care, many production/factory support has been built in too.

Migrating from 2.6.5 to 2.6.15 has been completed, now kernel 2.6.15 boots on OSD. BSP major changes include,
- Upgraded to Linux-2.6.15
- Upgraded to Binutils-2.16.1
- Upgraded to GDB-6.3
- Upgraded to GCC-3.4.6
- Upgraded to GLIBC-2.3.6
- Upgraded to Busybox-1.1.3

Work to migrate and integrate peripheral modules is in progress.

Board is ready to go ....... in a few days.

Ethernet issue has been resolved, problem was from both HW and SW side.

Ethernet hardware is validated and good when the following 2 modifications are applied,
1: Connect the Ethernet ground to the ground plane via a 0805 ferrite bead.
2: Fix connection in the CT of the transformer.

Then newer driver from Ethernet chip manufacture was ported into both u-boot and kernel, board now flies!

Video pass-through relay was wrongly placed, this will be part of the HW mods too.

Both Remote Control and RTC are working now...

Board will b

OSD Boards came to Xiamen on 06/02, here is the latest status of what got, (in short, boards are working except the Ethernet( yes, Ethernet again!!),

- Board boot to Linux and application was running.
- Composite Video in/out is working.
- S-video in is working.
- Audio in/out is working.
- USB host is working.
- SD/MMC/CF is working.
- Serial port is working.
- MSP430 part is working, able to get IR signal and timer ticks.
- Memory Stick not tested.
- IR blaster not tested.
- First 4MB Program Flash is working, however unable to access the second 4MB part, this should be SW issue. (Replaced with one single 8MB part, system works fine.)

DM320 native tool-chain is now available here

From the author, rasterman's own word,

i also compiled my own native gcc compiler
and got it working with the default rootfs image, so i am able to compile
things natively on the dm320 and thus avoid the cross-compile hassle (though
compiling on it is like continental drift!). i'm steaming ahead now. :)

Full discussion can be found at,
http://groups.google.com/group/Neuros-DM320Hardware