Olympus m:robe MR-500 Info

Overview

The official Olympus press release for the m:robe MR-500 is here: http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/cpg_pressDetails.asp?pressNo=351

Note: The Olympus has discontinued the entire m:robe product line.

Initial Port status

There has been an initial port of the Opie Distro of portable linux to the MR:500 by Shirour on: http://mrobe.fan.googlepages.com/. Many drivers have been initially written for the port but there has been no activity since 12/08/06.Also see http://mrobefan.elwiki.com/. A compiled version plus some documentation is available at http://www.scesoc.ca/~cat/arm/mrobe/.

There is also the beginings of an M:Robe 500i Rockbox port. Currently it is in the initial stages. Beyond what is available in SVN an additional piece of code is needed to start the Rockbox boot process based off Shirour and Cat's(a.k.a eigma) work on Linux. The code is attached at the bottom and can be built in a standard Rockbox development environment. Once built, an SVG file is generated that should be placed in a remix directory.

Touchscreen

• tsc2101.pdf

USB Controller

• e66591fw.pdf

Remote Control

• OlympusMRRemote - Remote Control protocol info

RTC

• 5c348ab-e.pdf

PCB Scans

• Bottom PCB Scan:
  

• Top of the PCB:
  

• The part that is obscured in the photo:
  

Sound Output Architecture

(In most cases, the things in brackets are references to the documentation for that particular block. SPRUxxx are Texas Instruments document numbers and they are freely available on www.ti.com.)

This may seem a bit complicated "just to make sound play", but it's actually fairly justified. Since the DMA controllers can (approximately) do one transfer per clock cycle, they are much faster and more power-efficient than the CPU for the same job. And besides, the CPU has better things to do (like decoding).

The 16Kw (32 kbytes) of DSP data RAM is split in two halves. As soon as one half is completely sent out via the McBSP (and at the same time as the second half is being sent out), the DSP starts up the HPIB DMAC to grab the next half from SDRAM. And so on.

There is currently a proof of concept patch available: eigma's sound/dsp work for mr500. It's a bootloader build and simply reads 4 MB worth of PCM data from the HDD into SDRAM and loops it. But you can hear stuff!

Attachment	Action	Size	Date	Who	Comment
tsc2101.pdf	manage	1203.8 K	25 Aug 2007 - 04:04	EricLowe
e66591fw.pdf	manage	271.7 K	31 Aug 2007 - 03:35	EricLowe
rej03f0101_m66591ds.pdf	manage	965.4 K	31 Aug 2007 - 03:36	EricLowe
5c348ab-e.pdf	manage	1400.9 K	31 Aug 2007 - 03:38	EricLowe
Botpcb.jpg	manage	616.6 K	31 Aug 2007 - 03:40	EricLowe	Bottom PCB Scan
Toppcb.jpg	manage	425.9 K	31 Aug 2007 - 03:43	EricLowe	Top of the PCB
Obscured_pcb.JPG	manage	216.5 K	31 Aug 2007 - 03:46	EricLowe	The part that is obscured in the photo
MrobLOAD.zip	manage	14.8 K	20 Sep 2007 - 04:58	KarlKurbjun	Rockbox initial bootloader/exploit
sound-architecture.png	manage	26.9 K	10 Apr 2008 - 02:52	CatalinPatulea	System architecture for sound output in the m:robe 500i