Low cost ARM9 SoC board - NSD100/NCB3AST

[Ian Smith]

On Sat, 7 Jun 2008, Bruce M Simpson wrote:

 > Hi,
 > 
 > I have just made a speculative purchase of an ARM9 based device, the 
 > Emprex NSD-100 (pictures of inside case):
 >     
 > http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/04/29/emprex-nsd-100-p2p-download-engine/1
 > 
 > The UK cost ex vat is ~35 UKP retail per unit.  8MB flash, 64MB DRAM, 2x 
 > USB2 ports and 1x 10/100 PHY.

Cute, and certainly affordable.

 > In other markets (eg. Australia) the AgeStar NCB3AST may be available, 
 > which has SATA (!), and 1 of the two USB2 ports on the SoC is configured 
 > as a device port. Though it's a bit more expensive:

After hunting, only found one vendor mentioned here so far: 
http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=XC4677&CATID=&keywords=bittorrent&SPECIAL=&form=KEYWORD&ProdCodeOnly=&Keyword1=&Keyword2=&pageNumber=&priceMin=&priceMax=&SUBCATID=

Jaycar have shops all 'round, and only punt on volume stuff usually. 
A$150 is about U$140, likely the usual 'double it for oz' pricing :)

And it's fanful, has apparently both 5 and 12V supplies, unspecified
wattage.  Fans spell eventual grief, and I'd rather single rail power.
So yours looks more interesting, to me anyway ..

 > A friend and I popped the top off the NSD100 as soon as it came in. 
 > There is some RF shielding which needs removed to get full access. There 
 > is a single 6-pin header for the UART, and apparently no JTAG, although 
 > there are pads for several resistors on the bottom.
 >
 > The box definitely runs Linux of some description although the serial 
 > lines seem very noisy.
 > 
 > A pinout which gives me the least amount of garbled text is:
 > 
 > VCC  1 2
 >      3 4
 > TX   5 6  GND
 > 
 > ...but TX appears to be connected to the +3.3V line. My MAX232 wants 5V, 
 > but only 3.3V is available. I didn't bother checking this with a scope...

Is VCC +5V, single supply, with 3.3V chopped from that?  If you get a
chance to measure DC mA on it at some stage running doing something, at
whatever V its brick supplies, I'd be interested to know (750Ah 12V
solar/battery here, so totally obsessive about real power drawn)

 > It seems to be 38400 8-N-1, same as the tinyhack guy says for the 
 > NCB3AST. Drops into BusyBox on boot, and we can just make out the 
 > messages from their Linux about it being the "FA526" CPU.
 > 
 > Both the NSD100 and NCB3AST use the Star Semiconductor Corp STR9104 
 > system-on-chip. The NSD100 allegedly uses U-Boot firmware.
 > 
 > Star on their website claim that the STR91xx has been purchased for use 
 > in various vendor designs:
 >     http://www.starsemi.com/vEng/index1.html
 > 
 > ...their product line appears to be positioned competitively with Intel 
 > XScale IXP.

Hope their quality control's up to the comparison ..

 > The STR91xx appears to incorporate a licensed FA526 ARM9 IP core from 
 > Faraday Tech. Corp. I believe the on-chip network controllers are 
 > implemented in a similar way.
 > 
 > I don't see any download links for the code which Emprex must provide, 
 > as they ship Linux in their product, to conform with the GPLv2 license. 
 > This guy claims to be working on opening up the Linux port:
 >     http://tinyhack.com/2008/05/18/hacking-ncb3ast-day-1/
 > 
 > There is a patch set for Linux 2.4 which adds STAR_STR9100 SoC support, 
 > and might serve as a jumping off point for starting to port FreeBSD to 
 > this device:
 >     http://tinyhack.com/files/patch-from-kernel-2.4.36.4-to-star.bz2
 > 
 > dmesg for a similar device is here:
 >     http://svn.openfoundry.org/usert2500/star/star_log.txt

You're not keeping up :)  Linux 2.6 startup with a dmesg / session:

http://tinyhack.com/2008/06/05/porting-linux-kernel-26254-to-star-str9100-agestar/

Interesting if only gratuitously,

Thanks, Ian