= the eBox2300 =

http://www.robotgroup.net/eric/seeker/ebox2300.jpg

The eBox-2300 is a small low cost embedded PC being sold by several different distributors.  This web page documents my efforts to utilize this computer for my SeekerRobot project.  I intend to use [http://www.puppyos.com Puppy Linux].  The version I am using is the eboxpup alpha 01 by Paul Akterstam located at http://bexa.org It is based on the 2.13 version of Puppy.  I tried upgrading to 2.14 and it was a disaster.  Fewer drivers supported, larger memory footprint, broken package management.  

I bought this unit from [http://www.ewayco.com eWayco].  They do not accept credit cards but even with the bank wire charges they were cheaper than [http://www.norhtec.com/index.html these guys] who accept credit cards.  The specifications are:

 * 200 MHz Via Vortex86 SOC
 * 128 MB Ram
 * 256 MB IDE Flash Drive
 * 3 USB 1.1 ports
 * 10/100 Realtek 8139 ethernet
 * AC-97 Audio
 * Compact Flash Slot
 * Built in VGA up to 1280x1024
 * Runs from a 12V 3A power supply!

The photo shows a serial port but I don't think you can get it with a built in flash drive and serial port together.  I also ordered mine with the optional wireless lan which ended up being a Via VT6655 card. /!\ WARNING! Do not waste your money on this wireless card.  It does not work with Puppy Linux and Via Technologies apparently has a long history of not supporting Linux.  Just check their own [http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=76162&enterthread=y message forums]. 

The wired 10/100 ethernet connection works great with the "8139too" driver module.

The Audio seems to work but ALSA does NOT!  

== Additional Hardware ==
http://www.robotgroup.net/eric/seeker/awll3026.jpg To get around the problem of not being able to use the built in wireless card, I plugged in a cheapo [http://www.airlink101.com Airlink] USB wireless 802.11b/g dongle.  The zd1211 driver in 2.13 works flawlessly!  Unfortunately, they replaced this one in 2.14 with the zd1211-rw which does not work.  Because the ebox only supports USB 1.1, you only get 11 Mbps on the wireless link.  Still, it works.

http://www.robotgroup.net/eric/seeker/DellSpeakers.jpg I purchased USB powered speakers and a couple of 256 MB CF cards from [http://www.discountelectronics.com Discount Electronics] for $9 each!  Those guys ROCK!

http://www.robotgroup.net/eric/seeker/HDEnclosure.jpg For Hard Drive space, I added a [http://www.outletpc.com/c6346.html 2.5 USB Hard Drive Case] from [http://www.outletpc.com Outlet PC].  I had a small 2.5in 6MB laptop drive already in my junk box.  I partitioned the hard drive for 5 GB ext3fs and 1 GB linux swap.  When booting from Flash, the swap is not automatically turned on.  Even placing "swapon /dev/sda2" in my ".xinitrc" did not work.  I have to manually enter it when booting from flash.  To make the system boot from the Hard disk, I had to play a lot of games with GRUB and the universal installer.  To tell the truth, I am not sure exactly what steps I went through to get it working.  Basically, I installed GRUB on the hard disk in both the Linux boot and MBR.  Both simple and expert installations fail to produce a bootable system.  Kept getting "Operating system not found".  I used fdisk to manually make the partition bootable.  Then I reran the universal installer and told it to overwrite the MBR with Syslinux.  Surprisingly, some combination of these steps produced a bootable USB hard disk.

http://www.robotgroup.net/eric/seeker/GPSimage.jpg I used this low cost [http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=MS-GM-03&cpc=HPM MS-GM-03 16-Channel USB NMEA-0183 GPS Receiver] purchased from [http://www.geeks.com Geeks.com] for $35!  To get it working under Puppy Linux I had to "modprobe cdc-acm".  I added this line to my "/root/.xinitrc" file.  The unit then attaches to "/dev/input/ttyACM0".  Open it up with cutecom and set the baud rate to 4800 baud and you can confirm that the gps data feed is working.

== Additional Software ==

Packages that I had to install with Pupget:
 * cutecom serial port terminal
 * vncserver Tight VNC server. Why VNC client is included in the default installation but server is not boggles my mind.
 * qt Dependancy from cutecom. Of course the version that it tries to automatically download (qt...NO-SQL) does not work so you have to load whatever the latest version choice is offered.