Hi.

As the subject line says, all the outstanding memory boards have now shipped. Once again I must apologise for taking so long to get this sorted out. I'm afraid I'm much better at designing things than organising things, and coupled with all the family issues I've had hanging over me for the last year (don't ask, it's way too complicated) I've made a right balls-up of fulfilling my obligations.

However, everyone who ordered one should get it in the next week or so, subject to the vagaries of the various postal services involved. There were about 8 boards unaccounted for after everything settled, and these have been offered to anyone who expressed an interest on a strict first-come first-served basis, which seemed the fairest way to do it. If any of these people decline the offer, I'll push it along to the next in line.

I doubt I will make any more boards after this. The amount of effort involved is far more than I can spare at the moment, and I don't want to score any more own goals in the process. If anyone else wanted to take on the project I would be willing to discuss licensing the design, manual, etc, but be warned it's a lot more work than it appears at first sight.

Pca

Any chance you'd be willing to license the video output design? Or if you don't have the rights, that you can convince the folks who commissioned it to GPL it?

Surely they can't believe that it'd be valuable to hold on to at this point...

It would be difficult, for a number of reasons. The main one is that the primary processor, which is also the video driver, etc, is an ARM7500FE. These chips are still available, but no longer manufactured, which is a pity as they have a lot of advantages in some ways over newer, faster arm processors. They are also not ROHS-compliant, ie not lead-free, which means that after July it would be illegal to use them in new products.

The design I came up with 4 years ago was good for the time, but is pretty expensive to make. It would be possible to redesign it using more modern parts, but it still wouldn't be cheap.

Also, the people I did the work for did after all spend a lot of money on the thing, and would see little reason to make it available to anyone else. Large companies are like that.

pca

I know I've mentioned it before, but it seems like something like Dlink's DVC-1000 video phone would do this with a bit of software. It can answer all incoming calls - so just have the empeg initiate a call when it boots up, and compress the screen video in the codec it needs. The only thing I'm not sure about is how much horsepower the video codec would need.

Matthew

I dont know if I managed to get on your list of interested parties but I am still interested in one preferably with out memory chips cause I already have 6..