TiVo Community Forums Archives - TivoNet for DirectTivo: ETA?

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TivoNet for DirectTivo: ETA?
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Posted by: wowbagger

Does anybody know when the TivoNet board for the DirectTivo units will be ready? All it says over at 9th Tee is "in progress". I'm holding off on doing my upgrade until such time as I can drop a NIC and 2 drives in my Sony.

Posted by: cc

I don't see how one could fit in there. I haven't heard of any work to make a directivo version either.

Posted by: 9thTee

Functionally, it works.
Fitting it in is another issue. We are currently looking at ribbon extenders and a couple other different approaches to fitting it in the box.
No ETA at this time.

Mark
9thTee.com

Posted by: jmccorm

quote:
Originally posted by Tracer:
Functionally, it works.
Fitting it in is another issue. We are currently looking at ribbon extenders and a couple other different approaches to fitting it in the box. No ETA at this time.

Translation: You can do it right now... IF you don't mind electronics and wires hanging out of your box. http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

Posted by: wowbagger

How exactly are you implementing this? Are you just placing the Ethernet chip on the board directly, or are you still trying to make the system use a standard Ethernet controller card?

It seems that if you simply placed one of the one chip wonder Ethernet controllers on the card, you could greatly reduce the size of the board, and make it fit.

Have you seen some of the non-PCI single chip Ethernet controllers for embedded use? I'd have to dig around my office at work through EE Times et. al. to find the reference, but it seems that would help the design.

Also, there are the chips with an embedded TCP stack and microcontroller - that might help reduce the workload on the PPC by doing the grunt work (packet checksumming etc.).

Posted by: Worf

Well, Crystal Semiconductors makes a one-chip-ISA ethernet solution, I've seen it used on the uCSimm (68k-based Linux system), and several other controllers, so it's easy to interface and use.

A TCP/IP stack on a chip wouldn't be too useful -- Linux already has its own stack, and probably several functions rely on it, or get someone to write a TCP module to use the chip -- a lot of work to lower the work. Luckily, network usage, even at full 10/100Mbps is quite slow (just the TiVo software uses up most of the CPU already).