Sheevaplug


This little wall plug is actually a full computer with 1.2GHz cpu, with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of of flash memory. It comes with versions of linux, ported for its ARM processor. At $50, this cool system could be finding itself in a lot of homes. You can get more information from the manufacturer. What uses can you think of for it?

I ran into this article on SheevaPlug, Tiny Linux Server | Hackaday

So, what do you think? any use of this for us Arduino lovers?

The hackaday article shows a price of US$ 50, but the manufacturer seems to sell it for US$ 99.

Link: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-kit.aspx

Yeah the $50 was a "future bulk-rate" price - i.e. educational/enterprise rate

It looks terribly lacking in easy-to-use IO of any kind :frowning: The easiest way to read switches and pots may be to plug a full-fledged arduino into the USB port of the thing.

This is basically your cheap wireless internet router with the wireless ripped out and extra memory, perhaps with the thought "if so many people are turning these routers into general purpose linux utility boxes, maybe we should just sell a general purpose linux utility box." Seems like a good idea to me. Fits my "$100 Paradox theory" just fine...

Heh. Their documentation could use another iteration of translation... "Circuit below illustrated the JTAG direct connection from 88F6281 to J6 header."

I connected my SheevaPlug and Arduino together with a USB cable and they work together well. The Arduino provides the low-level analog and digital I/O that the SheevaPlug lacks, and the SheevaPlug provides the computation power, storage, and web service that the Arduino lacks.

I wrote a blog post with details: Arduino + SheevaPlug = Cool Hardware Platform

If the CPU has 50 GPIO pins as I've seen mentioned, I wonder why on earth the Sheevaplug doesn't expose them. I guess the next logical step from there would be to see how hard it would be to hack them out to a usable connector for direct use. Anyone seen any analysis of the thing's guts yet? I haven't seen any internal pictures posted yet.

There is a lot of "risk" in exposing the I/O pins of CPU to the outside world. Especially on the rather large and fragile CPUs like the one in the ShivaPlug.

I'm sorta waiting for some vendor to get the idea of adding an arduino to their router (or whatever) platform, as "enablement" for creative interfacing. Most such boxes already have one or two serial ports that are not actually used, so the actual parts addition would be something like the ATmega itself and some connectors or pads (Hmm. How about just empty socket space to ADD an ATMega. (I'm worried that the $5 of added parts cost would NOT be insignificant on such a product. That's nominally $25 added at retail, which is a significant percentage of your typical less-than-$100 router box.))

I've looked into using the GPIO pins on the SheevaPlug and discuss the different pins in the SheevaPlug forum: http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=28.msg2391#msg2391

To summarize, the 50 GPIO pins are really multiplexed multi-purpose pins, of which 25 are used for the NAND flash interface, a serial USB port, SD card, reset line, status LED, etc. The other pins are somewhat accessible inside the plug, but aren't exposed outside. There's lots of other interesting CPU functionality that isn't exposed.

One guy did manage to connect a one-wire Dallas temperature sensor to the SheevaPlug using the SD card interface and bit-banged the protocol: http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=104. I decided it was much easier to do I/O through the Arduino :slight_smile:

If you want more details on the SheevaPlug I/O, the following links are the CPU pin info and the board schematics:

http://www.plugcomputer.org/index.php/us/component/content/article/39-sch-and-bom/52-files

Sheeva is a multi armed god in Hinduism.

I think it should have been called a ShaverPlug as there is no reference on the website to the God

Hi everybody,
does anyone tried the OSGi + JVM Add-on for SheevaPlug Dev Kit on SD-Card ?
10x
Regards,
asen