The EIR Board was developed in cooperation with the Elektor magazine. While mainly designed as an Internet radio, it is an ideal general purpose platform for your own hardware and software projects. It is based on an AT91SAM7SE CPU from Atmel, a VS1053 audio decoder from VLSI and Davicom's DM9000E Ethernet controller.
During hardware drafting, special emphasis was put on allowing extensions. All relevant CPU pins are available on 3 pin headers. 64 MBbyte SD-RAM, 64 MByte serial DataFlash and an MMC card slot provide sufficient storage for huge data amounts and even the most sophisticated applications.
The connector layout of the 100 x 100 mm board has been carefully crafted to allow for easy integration with your own cases. This makes the board especially suited for prototype development, as well as for direct integration into your finished product.
This robust board, in production since 2008, comes with all SMD components mounted. Our in-house quality assurance procedures guarantee a constant level of reliability. All through-hole components come packaged with the product and can be applied by the user as he sees fit, replaced with different components or simply left out.
Applications are developed in the high-level C language, using the freely available GNU-tools. An active open-source community develops and maintains Nut/OS, a cooperative multithreading operating system and TCP/IP-Stack, which has been created especially small embedded systems. Its extensively documented source code provides an easy to use programming interface which closely resembles that of the C language on PCs. While a fully working configuration file for the EIR is already included, any and all settings can be customized to fulfill any additional requirements with few mouseclicks in the graphical interface for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
A complete, internet-capable webserver requires less than 100 kBytes flash and 20 kBytes RAM. This leaves enough space for ambitious product designs, including a webbrowser-controlled Internet radio that is already flashed to the board before shipping. The Nut/OS distribution contains additional useful example applications.
Several companies with many years of experience in Nut/OS software and Ethernut hardware offer commercial support. Furthermore, mailing lists are an important element of this Open Source project, where developers use each others experience to help solving respective problems.
All target source code as well as the hardware design are published under the permissive free BSD License and can be used in commercial products for any purpose without licence fees. In opposite to some other Open Source licence models, it does not require to publish your own source code enhancements.
