A Ben NanoNote held on the palm of a hand |
|
| Manufacturer | Qi hardware, Sharism At Work Ltd |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Custom edition of OpenWrt |
| CPU | 336 MHz XBurst JZ4720 |
| Storage capacity | 1 SDHC slot, 2048 MB internal NAND flash |
| Connectivity | USB 2.0 , and IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN (as accessory) |
| Website | en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben NanoNote |
The Ben NanoNote is a small cheap pocket computer that runs Linux.[1][2][3][4] OpenWrt is the software platform and the Ben Nanonote is the physical development platform for the Qi Hardware project.[5]
From the Ben Nanonote website:[6]
Contents |
Originally the hardware was developed by a third party as a digital dictionary. After the effort of several Qi Hardware developers, the design was freed as open source hardware while using free and open source software.
This product is currently manufactured by Qi hardware and Sharism At Work Ltd. More than 1,000 units have been sold so far.[7]
The device is shipped with the OpenWrt software stack; the custom compilation includes a graphical menu called gmenu2x, with other graphical and command line applications available from the menu.[8]
OpenEmbedded is also available through the Jlime distribution.[9] The Pyneo software stack, a Debian-like distribution aimed for mobiles has been ported.[10] The MIPS port of Debian GNU/Linux can be run on the NanoNote.[11] Additionally there is NanoNixOS, a cross-compiled distribution based on the Nix package manager.[12]
Due the lack of wireless connectivity one of the first goals for the Qi Hardware movement was to implement wireless on the device. This add-on, the Ben WPAN was developed by Werner Almesberger,[13][14][15][16][17] and mainly consists of a IEEE 802.15.4 subsystem, made up of two boards: a USB dongle (ATUSB) connected to the computer and another card connected to the SDIO port of the device (ATBEN).
All source code, documentation and test procedures, software and hardware schematics are available under copyleft licenses.[18][19][20]
UBB, or Universal Breakout Board,[21] is a PCB shaped like a microSD card, focused on DIY projects and general purpose interfacing using the available MMC/SDIO port.
So far two hacks had been published: one of them, the integration with a 443 MHz RF transceiver[22] for power sockets control purposes and later a mix of bit-banging and SDIO/DMA features turning the SD card slot into a VGA port.[23][24]
As the Ben NanoNote uses an Ingenic JZ4720 processor it supports booting from USB without use of the NAND flash memory.[25][26]
The SIE board is an adaptation of the NanoNote. It has twice the memory and features a XC3S Xilinx FPGA on board. It is based on the XBurst JZ4725 SoC, which has more I/O pins available due to not having a keyboard.[27] [28]