Anyone want to take a shot at a t5325 port? Free t5325 for a successful port

So, a while back, I got an HP t5325 to play around with, and see what it could do. It looked like a promising possibility for a RISC OS port.

Unfortunately, I’m no programmer, and a RISC OS port is well beyond my ability.

Also, the t5325 has solder pads for a SATA port on the motherboard. While I was able to get a SATA port soldered in… I can’t get it to work. It powers drives up, but U-Boot can’t see the drive. Might be a problem with my soldering, might be that HP left important components off the motherboard, or it might simply be that U-Boot is configured incorrectly to initialize that port, and the Linux kernel also isn’t initializing it.

So, my loss may be your gain.

If someone here wants to take the t5325 port on, contact me, either at bhtooefr.gmail@com, or in this thread. I’ll ship it and its power adapter to you, at my expense, from Newark, Ohio, in the US. (You’re on your own for a keyboard and mouse, it takes standard USB peripherals. If I can find the DVI to VGA adapter, I’ll toss that in.)

Here’s what I ask of you, if you take it on:

1. Get the SATA port working. This is possibly the t5325’s biggest advantage over a Beagleboard, if it works. 2. Get it booting to the RISC OS desktop, with RISC OS itself being stored on the on-board 512 MiB flash. U-Boot is stored on a separate flash chip, so you’re safe there. (You could potentially put an ADFS partition in there, as well, if you wanted, there’s certainly enough room…)

If you get SATA and RISC OS both working, it’s yours. Do what you want with it.

If you get the SATA port working, but can’t get RISC OS working, I’ll pay for return shipping to me, or shipping to another developer that wants to take a crack at it. I do suspect that, unless there’s a hardware issue preventing it altogether, this will be the easier problem to solve.

If you get RISC OS working, but not the SATA port, either pay for my shipping to you, and you can keep it, or I’ll pay for return shipping to me, or to another developer that wants to take a crack at it.

If you can’t get either working (for whatever reason – time constraints, not being able to figure it out, whatever,) please be honest about it (don’t hang onto it forever, if you know you can’t get it done, just say so,) and I’ll ask that you send it back either to me or another interested developer, at your expense.

If you do wish send it to another developer, ask me before you send it on. I’d like to keep track of my thin client.

I considered just straight-up donating it, but I figured this would provide more motivation for a successful port, if anyone’s interested. (If anyone considers this a bad idea, or that it would distract from a more worthy port, feel free to complain. If there’s massive backlash against my proposal, I’ll change it – right now, the t5325 is sitting around doing nothing, but with working SATA, it could replace my server easily, so I don’t necessarily want to give it up if a RISC OS port isn’t successful.)

Eric, did you get any takers? If not, have you considered publicising this offer more widely?

I wonder whether WROCC would be interested in having it at their April show, for people to get together and discuss the problems in person.

I never did get any takers.

I’m kinda meh on the t5325 platform, now, given that other, far more modern platforms have been advertised. Not only that, there’s now a TI SoC, apparently related to the OMAP3, that will allegedly have some form of *TX form factor low cost dev board for it, which is basically a 1.5 GHz OMAP37xx with SATA. That’ll do nicely for RISC OS - far better than the t5325.

I might still repurpose the t5325 as a server, and if I can’t get SATA working, I may get a USB SATA RAID box for it, and just deal with USB.

I guess you mean this one that Steffen Huber spotted?

For the TI one, yep.

There’s also this, for a Tegra-based solution, not that we can use the second core: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/25/compulab-makes-a-tiny-tegra-2-computer-for-the-lilliputian-commu/

(The site for it is down right now, hence the Engadget article instead.)