djm's scribble

Did you know that the Chupa Chups’ logo was designed by Salvador Dalí? (I didn’t).

I have been playing with a new toy that was given to me in Japan: an IO-DATA USL 5P. These are a tiny computer, between the size of a deck of cards and a small paperback, which has a Hitachi SH-4 processor and 64MB of RAM. It boots off compact flash and has an Ethernet and five USB ports to talk to the outside world. They ship with a customised Linux distribution, but it is now possible to install OpenBSD on them.

Unfortunately, the installation process is a little fiddly. These devices don’t expose an RS-232 serial port for a console, only some TTL pins on their circuit board that use the wrong voltage to attach to normal serial devices. Nevermind, a $5 MAX3232 chip from Maxim, another $1 worth of capacitors and some breadboard (ok, and some swearing) had me a level converter that allowed me to attach the device to a standard serial port. OpenBSD booted fine, but my first attempts to install were thwarted due to a loose link on my breadboard. Once I fixed that, OpenBSD installed fine (via USB 802.11 no less) and I have a miniscule computer running Unix!