Dear experts , i am a developer in embedded space. i did work with some app layer modules .But I know nothing about the low levels . I want to learn ARM board firmware as well device drivers developments . But cant afford to buy a 100$ kit. So i decided to go hacking route , found the linksys wifi routers can be hacked .This will enable me to do a few drivers , buy these ase MIPs but these are MIPs . can u suggest ARM box for me to hack ? how can i learn the boot process of linux? how to debug USB drivers , what mechanism available? How to approach for a driver development ? Please help -ARM newbie
These are all good questions, but the answers you're probably looking for would fill a large textbook. My suggestion is to start searching the Internet for some of the easier questions first. It seems like you need to start with some easy stuff first, because it would take me weeks to start understanding what you're looking for (because I don't understand USB, booting Linux, or writing Linux drivers, either)
It depends on whether you want to develop applications for a full embedded OS (usually Linux), a RTOS (linked together with the application into a monolithic binary) or if you'd rather write a "bare metal" application which does not use an operating system, but accesses the hardware via driver libraries. Furthermore, there are different ARM families in use, most notably ARM7, ARM9, ARM966T and Cortex-M3. These cores are embedded in micros from various manufacturers, like Atmel (AT91SAM, AT92RM), NXP (LPC2xxx), STM (STR9, STM32) and others. On the smaller, ARM7-based variants a full OS can not be run due to memory restrictions mostly. But they are cheap and easily available if you can live with using a RTOS, which allows you task scheduling and such, often handles additional things like TCP/IP if available), or writing all needed functions by yourself. ARM7-based boards are fairly easy to build for the hobbyist, and most solutions are cheap and single-chip. If you want to go all the way, though, you could look out for readily available ARM-based hardware, which is not only found in routers. The Philips VP6500 IP-Phone is a hackable linux-based ARM platform recently discussed here in Germany, for example.
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