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

[John Watlington]

On Mar 9, 2010, at 11:22 AM, Tiago Marques wrote:

> Thanks. The connector for the WLAN card did seem a mini-PCIe but I  
> thought you were going to stick with SDIO.

We did.  Don't confuse a connector with the bus used
with it.   Many WLAN cards these days use a miniPCIe
connector/form factor but use USB as the interconnect.
We provide both USB and SDIO to the connector, but
only use SDIO.

Cheers,
wad

> On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 10:10 PM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org>  
> wrote:
>
> On Mar 7, 2010, at 10:24 PM, Tiago Marques wrote:
>
> Hi Wad,
>
> Been reading some "lost" e-mails, sorry to be bumping this up.
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 10:35 PM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org>  
> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
> You did? I can't find any reference in the XO 1.5 diagrams.
> Is it already being used for something?
>
> Read the next paragraph I wrote:
>
> 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
>
> CN19 in that document is the PCIe pinout.
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:XO_1.5_C1_Annotated_Motherboard.png
> shows the miniPCIe connector, with a WLAN card attached.
>
> Cheers,
> wad
>
>