OLPC hardware: what if there was an SDR modem / chipset?

[John Watlington]

On Jan 27, 2010, at 12:17 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

> hi scott, thanks for joining in, here.
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 3:01 PM, C. Scott Ananian  
> <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
>> Good luck with your SDR dreams.  I think the most you can expect from
>> OLPC is that, *if* the 10 improbable things you described actually
>> come to pass, OLPC will someday include a miniPCI slot so that they
>> can plug in your magic daughtercard.
>
>  miniPCI assumes there's a PCI bus.  ARM SoCs don't have PCI (that i
> know of).  the only SoC x86 chip i've heard about is the 1ghz IEC
> 100HV from RDC.  but with ARM it'd have to be a mini PCI-e slot with
> the USB2 option - pins 36 and 34 - but that's been ruled out because
> john's removed all internal USB paths.  the next gen x86 clone from
> RDC that they're planning will have full PCI-e.

Actually, I got that miniPCI connector into XO-1.5.   I won't go into  
all
the tradeoffs.  It suffices to say that when the overall lifetime  
costs of
100K laptops are considered, it didn't increase the cost.

But as with most networking cards, the miniPCI is just a form factor.
Most WiFi/GSM cards on the market electrically use a USB connection.
On XO-1.5, we use SDIO, but also provide a spare USB port to the miniPCI
(why not ?)    The form factor is half-length miniPCI, and the pinout
is documented at: http://wiki.laptop.org/images/0/05/ 
XO_1.5_Pinouts_C2.pdf

> thank you for everyone's time, i'll be back again when i have more
> concrete news.

Great.

Cheers,
wad