Dell Laptop for Embedded Work

Hello Ulf,

They pretty much all do now. The coolest thing is that little EZ430 stick. You can connect wires to it after cracking it open and then use it at a client site. Slips right into a small pocket. Of course, airport security will want to know what that thing is...

Interesting, it looks like they shortened the descriptions since I was there last. They also no longer list things like the monitor connector and PC card slots either. All the T30 series have a serial and parallel port. I think they dropped the serial port on the T40 series. It appears that most of the information has been moved over to the lenovo site now. A bit of a pain to find the model from the IBM site and then have to go over to the lenovo site to see what all is included on a particular model. On the bright side it looks like the hardware maintenance and service manuals are still available for download on the lenovo site.

I have only used the parallel port to run an LCD display which worked fine.

The Thinkpads dropped the internal floppy option a while back. I have an external USB floppy which is probably not worth the price any more.

How reliable is the USB floppy, and what sort of price is involved? Do they come with a proper Windows installation CD, or is it a system restore nonsense. Does your parallel port usage mean bit banging? Is the USB 1 or 2?

I don't use the USB floppy very much (I actually borrow it from work) but haven't had any problems with it. (I mostly use USB flash drives._ It is plug and play under Windows XP and shows up as a removable drive (duh!). It is the IBM version which was in the $100 range. I have seen other ones in the $30 range, which is more reasonable. I haven't tried booting from the USB floppy but there are BIOS options that imply it can be done.

The parallel port use was all bit banging. Put out data for the LCD, pulse the E line, etc. I actually did it under Linux using a Knoppix CD (and a USB flash drive for my code) so as not to disturb the hard drive with Windows XP. I seem to remember I had to do some BIOS configuration on the parallel port so that is was where my Linux code expected to find it.

I think the USB is 1.1 - it doesn't support the 480Mb speed. It works with several different USB flash drives, my digital camera and the TI EZ430-F2013 development kit.

For lab use, a Via epia M10000 is really good. You need to put it in a box with whatever storage media you want, but otherwise it is a very complete computer with parallel printer port, serial ports, USB ports, ethernet, i2c, audio, display controller etc.

I use one in a very basic box with nothing but a hard disc. It happily runs linux and I rsh to it from another computer to save having lots of monitors about.

Bit-banging the printer port works fine, as does the i2c interface (although I only get 16kbit/s throughput using the linux drivers).

Its quiet and really cheap too!

John

...

Somebody gave my son a USB floppy she was going to throw out because it didn't work. By son took it because he thought I might like to see why. He was told that it was only supposed to work with an IMAC. I plugged it into my XP machine and it worked fine: no drivers needed. I asked my daughter to try it on her IMAC, and it worked for her too. That was a year ago and she won't give it back. I think the original cost was about $40.

Jerry

get an old one, or a PCMCIA card with a true parallel port.

The AVR Dragon has a nicer box :-)