From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_rockbox.org>
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 14:03:14 +0100 (CET)

On Wed, 1 Feb 2006, john wrote:

> That reminds me: Anyone heard anything new from Neuros? Their concept of a
> fully open (hardware and software) platform seemed quite promising. At least
> I noticed there was a meeting with the rockbox developers.

There was a meeting. There's an open mailing list where they discuss their
upcoming models that supposedly are to be open source.

There's already some source code available in their Subversion repository.

They are gonna make at least three different players based on the same
platform. The platform of choice includes a TI DM320 chip with an ARM926 core.

Given the reasoning on the mailing list mentioned above, they are going for
Linux on all their units. They have not mentioned what apps or similar that
they would base things on, or if they plan to write everything from scratch.
They did mention using nano-x for grahpics.

* They say they want to do it open source, yet they design and work along very
   much without releasing any source code. Even discussing GUI design and
   everything.

* Chips from TI come with no docs what so ever for us mere mortals so we can't
   get our hands on the actual low-level info.

* They claim they will support WMA for example by buying the necessary
   codec(s), but I find it very interesting to see how that is gonna make it
   into a Linux/Open source player that I would suspect is gonna involve a fair
   share of GPL licensed code.

* The DAC won't be accessible by the CPU parts but will have to "go through"
   the DSP parts and a "binary blob"-library provided by the ones deemed worthy
   enough to see the secret docs from TI.

* The "N3" model is the only one they actually have mentioned to consider
   Rockbox for. It is planned to be a music player appearing sometime during
   2007.

* You can buy development boards from them now (160 USD without LCD and no
   HDD iirc), although I don't think they're shipping yet since they are
   patching some things and might do a second round of boards first. They say
   they have a working u-boot setup for it.

Of course, even if they don't opt to go the Rockbox route, we can always make
Rockbox run on it by ourselves.

(Both the opinions that shines through and the mistakes in this summary are my
own.)

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.rockbox.org/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/

Received on 2006-02-01