building your own hardware

After searching around for an inexpensive board with: 2+ megs ROM 8+ megs RAM 3 ethernet ports

that costs less than the soekris boards with 3 nics I'm looking into assembling my own. I'm prototying a simple home VPN system.

Questions - how do you go about this? Are there really inexpenisve storage options and processors to look into (System on chip? ARM?)

If you happen to know of a board that meets these qualifications, or how to have a board custom made (in quantity probably) please let me know.

Josh

The Ethernets are a problem - I doubt that you'll find a cheap sollution with 3 eths...

You can try using a pc104 board with one/two eths and buy an additional pc104-based eth board...

The only thing you need to estimate well are the CPU and RAM usage for your sollution - the flash/rom can be upgraded later (but this is rearly needed)... ARM7, PPC8xx and SH3 boards are pretty cheap...

There's a huge number of pc104 hw vendors :))

Uzytkownik "Josh McCormack" napisal w wiadomosci news:bm2e0r$1qi$ snipped-for-privacy@bob.news.rcn.net...

What do You mean inexpensive ? ;-)

Some options you can always connect third eth via pcmcia/CF or add nonPCI chip like smcs '111 or cirrus cs8900

Intel ixp255 - probably obsolete 2eth Intel ixp425 2eth bga package

Mayby Motorola quicc device would be choice some of them has 4eth device AFAIK

less powerfull, arm7tdmi Samsung sn5n8947 2eth 208tqfp - I suggest this one, but I'm afraid 7tdmi architecture wont be powerfull enough to support ssl coding online.

There is new atmel at91rm9200 it's arm 920 arch chip 1 eth only but with 2 usb host so you can use usb - eth dongle or cf eth card

Jarek

For the storage, Compact Flash might be the sanest, because the pin spacing is fairly wide. Either that, or DiskOnChip, but I think that's more expensive.

For the processor, you have lots of choices. The real trick will be to find something you can sanely hand-solder. No BGAs for you....

First you have to get it designed. I'd recommend EAGLE, if you want to do the design work on Linux. (cadsoftusa.com) You'll either need to buy the Standard version to be able to make a board big enough to hold all the parts, or you'll have to string together a few smaller boards.

Getting prototype PCBs made will be expensive. I wouldn't try hand-etching them.... you're going to have too much SMD stuff to even be thinking about hand-etched boards. Expect to spend $100-200 per board run. That's good incentive to check your design carefully before submitting it for prototyping.

How good are your soldering skills? You're going to be dealing with a lot of small SMD stuff. Most Ethernet chips and CPUs are going to have pin pitches well under 50 mils.

What do you mean by quantity? For a Home VPN, you might want to consider the AT76C711, Two Ethernet MACs and a WLAN MAC in a single chip. but this is only for serious project with considerable volume. (You should be talking 10s of thousands)

How do you plan to use the NICs. WAN,DMZ,Local ?

Then performance of the CPU starts to be interesting and the ARM9 in the AT91RM9200 might be called for.

There are PowerPCs with múltiple Ethernets as well.

This would not be Linux, but did you take a look at the Ubicom 3023 processor. Same has four EII interfaces (100 MBit Ethernet with the line adaptation to be added externally) and comes with an SDK that supposedly makes it easy to create a VPN device. Cost for the chip some $15, line adaptation and flash needs to be added (RAM is provided internally).

I did not use the 3023 (which is to be released to sales soon), but I am very happy with their 2022 that is supported by the same SDK (that is based on GNU tools).

-Michael

How about this one:

pojen