Mele A1000 testbed

Here is a photo of my testbed:



It is an improvisation, due to lack of space. The "table" is a piece of chipboard on top of my camping fridge.

The Mele is on the right. It has three USB sockets, which is good, but I have plugged in my USB hub for convenience to plug in more devices.
Notice the little daughter-board hanging off a cable -- that is a socket for a SATA 2.5 inch laptop drive -- definitely on my to-buy list, when the budget allows.

The only thing that I am finding inconvenient is that I have to set time/date at every bootup, as I am working off-line. I don't know if the motherboard has any capability to add a battery-backed clock, or whether all it needs is a battery.

There is a snapshot of the motherboard. This was posted to the arm-netbook mail-list and the full-size photo is 2590x1943:
http://i.imgur.com/1xd2j.jpg

Here it is reduced:



Some of the sockets on the motherboard are a mystery, but I do know that the one at the bottom is a UART, and Tom (a guy on the arm-netbook mail-list) kindly provided me with a serial-to-usb converter so that I can monitor kernel bootup on my laptop.

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Comments

WiFi Suport
Username: cnxsoft
You could enable WiFi for network access. depmod -a edit /etc/network/interfaces with your settings ifup wlan0 I'm using it and it works fine.

Capable Board
Username: Raffy
"It's almost an x86 board, so a really useful appliance. Puppy Linux will find it a good playground. I will try to send you a laptop hard drive on Monday. ("Try" 'coz the carrier cost can be unpredictable - sometimes ordering online can be cheaper :)

VGA o/p also
Username: BarryK
"The motherboard has both HDMI and VGA outputs. The VGA socket is actually off the motherboard -- see those two white sockets on the right side of the motherboard, the larger one is the VGA output (the smaller is power for the SATA hard drive).

Tags: puppy