[En-Nut-Discussion] Supporting Other Target Platforms

[Harald Kipp]

Hi Nic and others,

At 16:00 05.02.2004 +1100, you wrote:
>I'd be a bit worried about OKI chips, for the people who are in a supplier 
>black
>hole like Australia. It's very hard to get our hands on these chips.
>Atmel on the other hand is readily availabe, support is easy to get too,
>If this is to become Ethernut 3, I'd strongly recommend staying with a
>mainstream / low volume manufacturer
>
>my 2 cents
>
>Nic

I'll take the chance to answer in a more general way.

egnite will not be able to design and produce Ethernut
hardware for all CPU flavors. We hope, that more hardware
vendors will offer low level Ethernet enabled boards
and support Nut/OS. That strategy may look stupid to
our revenue oriented business, but only on the first
look. I strongly believe, that if more people become
involved, our company will benefit in the end.

Charon II from http://www.hw.cz/ is a good alternative
and we will put more effort into it's support. Hopefully
Jan can get its production quantities up.

http://www.lins.de/ has started with a Coldfire design.
I wish he will get more response from this list than
last time.

Nevertheless, new hardware is coming from us. Mid of
this month we will have the first series of
Ethernut 2.zip, an ATmega128 - LAN91C111 - 32 kByte RAM
module with PLCC-84 form factor. After this we will
immediately start with an Ethernut 3 reference design,
based on ARM. Like with Ethernut 2, we will publish
early layouts and will be open to discuss them. This
mailing list previously "forced" us, to put a CPLD on
Ethernut 2, which was a very good decision.

And I agree with you, that it is most important to
use easy to get parts for Ethernut 3 to attract
potential users. OKI is indeed a bit difficult,
as they mainly produce these chips for their own
use.

Last, we consider to change the PCB format to
something more flexibel. Don't panic, Ethernut 1/2
will be kept unchanged :-)

Harald