CS-E9301 Experience

Dear everybody,

I have some questions related to the CS-E9301/9302 board from Olixmex.

a) Does anybody have experience withe board?

  1. Can I use Eclipse and its tools also to generate files for CS-E9301.

  2. What do I have to install.

  3. Does the CD coming with the board everythink I need to compile and uplaod my software?

You see a lot of points of interest. Due to the fact that Cirrus is new for me I would like to get some information how to create files and what do I need in addition to the board. Please help me.

Bye Andreas

Hi Anders,

CS-E9301 is not like other ARM boards we have, it’s complete computer with large amount of RAM, Flash etc and can run real operation system like Linux, NetBSD, WinCE etc.

for such enviroment you will rare need JTAG for the development as you can compile and debug your code on your PC then load it in CS-E9301 flash with RedBoot.

Do you use JTAG to develop the software on your desktop PC? About the same is the need to work with JTAG on CS-E9301 although we included it to this board.

Of course you can use Eclipse If you want to make code without OS, but you will have to handle much processor initializations, interrupts, peripherials etc. while on Linux you have standard drivers for the USB hosts, SD/MMC etc which otherwise you have to write yourself, which doesn’t make much sense, right?

For this board it’s more easy to use Linix and all available tools for C development under Linux, but this is just my opinion.

We ship now all boards with pre-loaded Linux 2.4 image, now we finish Linux 2.6 which will be included in all CDs in 2 weeks.

On the CD there is now: linux 2.4 installation, NetBSD installation and soon we’ll include the Linux 2.6 installation

CS-E9301 offer almost same performance/capabilities as old 486 PC you can use it for server, terminal, bridge etc what you can do with embedded PC - but it’s ARM and take much less power than PC - for instance CS-E9301 uses about 0.5A/5V i.e. only 2.5W while even the oldest 486 PCs needed 50-60W for the motherboard.

Best regards

Tsvetan

Thanks olimex for your soon answer,

please give me one more chance for a question concerning the board.

  1. You are talking about JTAG compiler. Where can I get it?

  2. I have read a new board with a LCD display is still in development on your side and ready for distribution in october. Is this correct?

  3. Can you give me an assumption about the cost of this board.

Thanks a lot.

Hi,

I’ve receieved a CS-EP9301 board from Olimex, and it works nicely. The preinstalled linux booted with out problems, and once I find a bit of free time, I’ll upload linux 2.6 to it.

You can use Eclipse and the GNU toolchain to generate files for the CS-EP9301, both if you want to work on bare-metal and if you plan to use Linux on the board.

You’re probably best off if you use a linux host if you plan to develop Embedded Linux applications on that board. Cygwin should work, too, but it’ll be much easier to develop with a real Linux.

There’s no such thing as a JTAG compiler. What Tsvetan meant is that if you don’t want to use Linux (or some other full-featured operating system), you’ll most likely need a JTAG debugger while developing your code.

Regards,

Dominic