Hello goers of Element14, and Ben, if you're peeping in here every so often! long time viewer here with something interesting, I think.
I have one of these Sylvania SYNET7 generic chinese CVS-sold 7" netbooks in my posession. Recently, I took interest in it after it had been sitting for some time, and loaded up Raspbian Wheezy Softfloat (2013-05-29-wheezy-armel.img) with a custom kernel, found here: https://cae2100.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/well-ive-been-talking-about-designing-my-own/
There are also instructions on that blog which give the step-by-step for getting the flash card prepped to be used in such a system.
It's based on a junky WonderMedia wm8505, ARMv5 running someplace in the 250MHz range. it also only posesses 128MB of RAM. Originally, these run either Windows CE or Android. Mine ran CE and had the NAND Flash chip onboard go faulty, so running Linux via an SD card is the only viable option still holding it together. Supposedly the third revision of the board negates the NAND for a USB flashdrive, but these cheaply-made junk drives seem to have problems with Linux loaded on them, however it should be fairly easy to replace and drop in say a MicroSD reader with a 32GB MicroSD card and be good to go while keeping the SD card slot free. The screen is 800x480, and is sharp at that. has a pretty nice viewing angle as well for something made so cheaply. seems to also have a Gigabit NIC onboard as well, another surprise for something so cheaply made.
So I had two ideas sprout from this-- One, it has some GPIO traces, most notably one to switch on and off the internal WiFi dongle (mine is dead and needs to be replaced) embedded in the lid, and I'd expect more. As I can't find a schematic for the board (and knowing me, I probably won't) I can't map out the GPIO pins that are available to poke and prod around with. Attached is a semi-decentish picture of the motherboard underside of my version, found from Google. There seems to be an unused USB port there on the top left next to the white battery connector as well... Also what look to be unused mPCIe solder pads on the board? hmm...
So the idea here would be to break out all the GPIO pins not currently in use by internals and make then accessible on the outside of the device via some sort of a jumper block and some ribbon cable... but a schematic would have to be found to break them ALL out. in this case, it'd be say, an interesting development netbook, and while running Linux, maybe the brains for some sort of 3D printer or other weird creation?
The other idea would be to remove the current motherboard, or as much of it as feasibly possible, drop in a raspi or cubieboard2 with unneeded components removed or relocated (there's a LOT of unused space on the back and sides, and on either side of the screen by the teeny speakers as well, possibly an excuse to make use of a Pi camera board?). I'd think the cubieboard2 would be better suited since it's much more powerful than the Pi with all the fixings still... but the Pi is cheaper. so it'd be a lot better in terms of price.
I'd say the second idea would be more of an interesting challenge for Ben, if it's considered feasible. it's the right thickness, at least, to house a Pi with modification to the ports, and the netbooks themselves are a dime a dozen used, in all walks of life, from different brands using the same cheapo design and hardware in all cases... but in the end, they're full of all sorts of fun stuff to play with! I'd also like to know if anyone else out there in the community may have one of these doing anything interesting.So far my only use for it is as a communications device to talk to some friends via irssi and not really much more, since my SD card is slow and that makes the swap slow, so running X is a pain. a faster SD card would give faster swap and therefore allow for a fasteer UI experience, but I don't see the need if I can just use wicd-curses to connect to an access point and go from there in CLI.
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