Re: Home Grown ActionTec Development Daughterboard

>BTW: Does anyone know if it is going to be possible to make the Actiontec 
>USB port a "controller", like a USB port on a PC?  I know a source of +5V 
>would be required.  This would allow for the addition of some "interesting" 
>peripherals, like hard drives, 802.11b "dongles", etc.
>
>The other option may be to figure out how to add a compact flash interface 
>using the J5 connector's 8-bit I/O port.  I know that a "funky" driver 
>would be needed to access it, but that too would give some interesting 
>peripheral options, including expanded flash memory, "micro" hard drives, 
>WLAN, etc.

I made a post a while back about using FPGA / CPLD on the daughtercard, as 
was on the Gameboy thingy:

http://www.express.org/pipermail/actionhack/2004-February/000702.html

The Gameboy unit used the FPGA as a controller to external SDRAM & flash, as 
well as to provide up to 64 bits of external GPIO.  Check out the links in 
the above post; lots of good info there as they used the FPGA to do many of 
the things I see possible with this Actiontec modem.

For FPGA / CPLDs, here are freeware modules to program into them:

http://www.opencores.com/browse.cgi/by_category

Of note are the following free cores:

General-Purpose I/O (GPIO) Core
UART 16550 core
USB 2.0 Function Core  (I assume this is a master controller)

The challenge I see is doing anything practical with only 8 data lines and 4 
address lines to work with via J5, but as you point out there could be an 
intelligent controller programmed into the FPGA that is essentially a "bus 
expander" device requiring funky device driver.

BTW, I got a reply from Digilent that their $15 CPLD 40 pin dip module is 4 
weeks from production.  But since we have surface mount experts on the list, 
maybe we don't need it and could directly use the CoolRunner II - XC2C256 
CPLD. :-)

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