Heh, I have my eye on Technologic's TS-7800 for an embedded project I have planned.

I've been reading up a little about CAN. Looks interesting. Have you used it for anything?

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If only the TS-7800 had VGA, it'd work as a low power desktop!

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It has an FPGA and PCI. It seems to me that adding VGA shouldn't be too hard.

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I agree that it should be easy. The TS-7800 would take a PCI card, except that the board has a PC/104 connector instead of a conventional slot.

So, go out and obtain a PCI video card. You can obtain low end, PCI-based GeForce 5000s and ATI Radeons for less than $50 at NewEgg, for example.

Next, look around for a PC-104 to PCI-Slot carrier board. Alternatively, you could build your own adapter. A homemade cable would work. Breadboards or wire-wrapped solutions may be more satisfactory. I'd have to double-check the specifications, but it should be a pin-to-pin design.\

Then you have an issue of getting the software to work. Good luck. You'll want to research the quality of fully open-source drivers for your particular graphics card, as ATI and NVIDIA's binary drivers obviously won't be an option. I hear ATI has some pretty good purely-open source for most of their Radeons. (Except my AGP-based Radeon HD 2400 Pro, which doesn't have working drivers, period.)

If anybody does this project, I'm definitely interested in a write-up!

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Haven't done doodlesquat yet. I'm going to take the board over to Thailand now and spend some quality time hacking it. If anyone wants to have a beer and talk about Forth thereabouts then send me an email :-)

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Haha, well, anytime you are anywhere near the Midwest, do hit me up. I'm very much up for a beer!

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Very intriguing.

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Nice little board. it's mighty handy that they have most or all the pins extended for hardware hacking. So do you plan on using Thumb instructions, ARM instructions, or a little bit of both?

I'm interested in the Thumb-2 instruction set, so I'd like to get my hands on a ARM Cortex-based single board computer, preferably a Cortex-R. The -A and -R subfamilies are backward compatible, while the Cortex-M subfamily is Thumb-2 only.

So did you consider getting the Cortex-M3 board, or would committing to Thumb-2 instructions unnecessarily cramp your master plan?

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