Atmel NGW100 Linux Embedded Network Gateway
May 14th, 2009 by TheKidd
After a long hiatus, I’m back! Work has been crazy, but I may have a bit more time on my hands now. To get things off to a good start, I purchased an Atmel NGW 100 Embedded Linux demo board the other day. I have been drooling over the idea of integrating circuit design with the Linux operating system for some time and at a cost of $70-$80, its a steal.
Picture of the product.
The Atmel NGW100 board which measures in at 120mm by 100mm comes with the AT32AP7000 processor which runs at 130 MHz (150MHz overclocked). It also has 16MB of flash memory, 32MB of SDRAM, SD Card reader for storage, 2 10/100 ethernet controllers, a serial and a USB connection. It appears to come pre-installed with a nice copy of the BusyBox Linux distro on it which includes command line tools, SSH, a web server, NFS and Samba.
I found a very interesting project for this board on Sawdust’s Blog called ‘Network Accessible A/C Outlet Control‘. You can also find a lot of useful information on this board at AVRfreaks and on their NGW 100 Documentation Wiki.
I think I am going to recreate Sawdust’s device first just to play around and get use to it. After that, I am really interested in trying to get Asterisk loaded onto the board. I am figuring that with the overclocked processor, I should be able to squeeze 2-4 VoIP lines out of it. From what I’ve found out so far though, it is going to be a real pain to get Asterisk’s voice codecs compiled to run on the Atmel processor. Oh well, if it isn’t challenging, it isn’t fun!
Besides playing with the NGW100, I will also get back to work on XBee, home automation, and a lot more VoIP/Asterisk stuff. I’ll keep everyone updated.
