Tip: Affordable LCD terminal

Post by **TANE** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 11:26 pm

What you also can do is go for the Asus R2H

7" touch screen
Windows XP
etc..
search on marktplaats.nl they ask about 300 euro for it.

Post by **Snelvuur** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 11:21 am

only thats not special "wall build" , the elo you can get for the same price of the asus r2h (new though). I can always spare a machine of make one without moving parts if needed. (or have a thin client for it)

Besides we are boys.. we rather want 15 inch, compared to 7 inch right?

Post by **Niknik** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 11:43 am

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by snelvuur
 Besides we are boys.. we rather want 15 inch, compared to 7 inch right?
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Ehehe, good one.

But indeed, for home use I also think 7 inch might be too small (it would be fine for a car PC though - at least until we can get 8" or 9" cheap.

Post by **eizo** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 8:28 pm

I would appreciate If You cold send me a copy too, since I got same problem, I can not unzip the NK.bin with the uneizo tool.
Getting strange error messages.
Thx
Matt

Post by **MindBender** » Sun Aug 19, 2007 10:50 pm

Hm. Here is usually my speech about re-reading the detailed instructions I wrote, but I had to take my foot out of my mounth while I was downloading the archive from Eizo to check out the original file names. It seems that Eizo has changed something in their file format. I don't have time to investigate that now, but I can give you a couple of pointers.
The file NK.bin doesn't need to be unzipped. It's the actual Windows CE and it only needs to be copied to the root of your CF card. The other two files appear to the the ICA client and the Remote Desktop Client. Check if you can uneizo them. If you can, put the resulting files in their respective directories as mentioned above and check if your eClient works. And let us know, also if it works.

Post by **eborger** » Tue Nov 20, 2007 6:22 pm

Interesting topic and actually the only one I could find about the 630l. Mindbender's instructions have been helpful: our 630L is now an 630L-N

Does seem like the CF has some problems: I get an wbtwizrd.exe not found at startup.

Anyway, what we would like to do with the machine is run our own winCE application on it. Anyone an idea on how to install software on the machine?
I was able to run software through IE, but that's not really an option. Would be nice to have an application on the CF and be able to autostart it...

Post by **MindBender** » Tue Nov 20, 2007 8:54 pm

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by eborgerI get an wbtwizrd.exe not found at startup.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Is the file missing at all or is it located somewhere where WinCE cannot find it? Didn't extracting the archieve produce this file? The file wbtwizrd.exe should be placed in the folder RDP. Anyway, it's not really an important file. It's ran once to setup your terminal.<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Anyone an idea on how to install software on the machine?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">I'm not really sure if that's possible. I think it's fairly easy to add it to your CF card, but gaining access to it from the terminal itself is another story: You may need to add it it your WinCE configuration by recompiling your installation, the same way WinCE system builders do that. Perhaps our existing configuration can be de- and recompiled to switch on a couple of features. Replacing an existing, accessable application like ICA client may be a simpler solution.
Anybody any experience with this?

Post by **eborger** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 11:16 am

<blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by MindBender
 Is the file missing at all or is it located somewhere where WinCE cannot find it? Didn't extracting the archieve produce this file? The file wbtwizrd.exe should be placed in the folder RDP.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">Yes, the file is available in the RDP dir, so I'm guessing the CF isn't what it used to be... <blockquote id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Replacing an existing, accessable application like ICA client may be a simpler solution.
Anybody any experience with this?
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote">That's what came to mind indeed, haven't been able to try it though.
UnEizo unfortunately isn't able to extract the NK.bin, would be interesting to peek inside, seems to be some sort of file-based-disk or something? As it holds the my documents and such and you can store favorites.
The IE5.5 is just a bit too old for us to be used as a webbased version of our software (we need to compile it for CE by the way, so have been able to test it anyway.
Tried downloading a CE version of Putty, but couldn't get it to start. System says it's not a CE program.

Post by **MindBender** » Wed Apr 23, 2008 11:11 pm

Instant update: I've got a kernel running on the eClient. If anybody is interested I can post details, but I'm not going to type my fingers blue if nobody cares [;)]

Post by **Tomcat** » Wed Apr 23, 2008 11:53 pm

Sounds very interesting. Please post the information.

Post by **eborger** » Thu Apr 24, 2008 11:07 am

We're stil interested here, as we have 3 eClients doing nothing (though for our business solution, we've moved to an other platform).

Post by **MindBender** » Fri Apr 25, 2008 12:24 pm

I will write a web-page with all details on this topic soon. Until that I can already explain a couple of things, because it's really not that difficult.

First of all, the NK.bin file is basically what the Windows folder on your PC is. I don't really know if it's a kernel with a file system or a file system with an OS in it, but that doesn't matter very much. What I do know is that this file contains a number of sections that need to be loaded at their specified address, much like an ELF file. This file is usually built by the Microsoft Windows CE System Builder software. I have no experience with this process, but finding out the file format and putting a Linux Kernel in a home-brew NK.bin seemed like the way to go here.

The NK.bin file format is told to published by Microsoft, but I wasn't able to find it. What I did find instead was a tool that did exactly what I needed: Put a Linux Kernel and a ramdisk in a NK.bin file:
http://winterm.gaast.net/main.php/intro.html
Browsing around on that site taught me that the WYSE WinTerm uses a similar platform and has a larger user base interested in the device to run Linux. These guys also modified a version of 'Damn Small Linux', DSL for short, to run on the WinTerm. Unfortunately this version is based upon a 2.4.x Kernel and hence very old. Besides that, the WinTerm has a VGA output instead of a TFT panel and hardware virtualization used by the CS5530 on this platform makes things very hairy:
http://osdir.com/ml/bios.openbios/2005-08/msg00003.html
http://osdir.com/ml/bios.openbios/2005-08/msg00000.html
To make things even worse, the processor is already in protected mode when control is given to the OS in NK.bin so part of the initialization normally done by the Kernel needs to be skipped. On to of that BIOS function calls can no longer be made so auto detection of hardware isn't possible anymore either. Of course the processor could be switched back to real mode, but the good guys at gaast.net decided to skip part of the Kernel an assume most of the hardware configuration. I'm not really in favor of that, but from the other hand the variation in configuration is limited on these kind of platforms. They did seem to have gotten everything to work quite well, but since these project demand a lot of work I think it's abandoned eventually.
In general the whole work-flow on how to build, convert and install the whole thing wasn't clear to me either.

So I was about to give up when I remembered the post referred to above stated that the eClient was able to run Windows 98. I also remember a German guy selling these thing on eBay als all-in-one computer, but people will write anything to sell their stuff. But just to be on the safe side, I started to press keys after power-up and to my surprise the 'del' key reveals a quite regular BIOS setup menu! This setup menu even allows you te select the boot method: WindowsCE or BootSector.

So I prepared a CompactFlash card with the GRUB bootloader and I copied the Linux Kernel from my office machine onto it. I changed the boot method into 'BootSector' and fiddled around a bit. Eventually the type of CompactFlash needs to be changed into 'Autoconfig LBA' and the eClient executed GRUB and booted my Kernel. Even the frame buffer is working nicely; The graphic menu of GRUB works and the graphic background on my Linux terminal works too, unfortunately in 600x800. When I switch the Kernel to 1024x768 the graphic background is gone.

Tinkering around with BIOS settings is a bit hairy. If any of the settings are wrong it's very hard to get into the BIOS setup menu again. Plugging and unplugging helps, but I hope it will retain working setting after power-loss. I haven't found a CMOS battery anyway. This doesn't make it easy on experimenting for the proper CompactFlash and IDE setting. Unfortunately the system doesn't boot with any of my 8GiB, 2GiB and 1GiB CompactFlash cards. The 32MiB card works, just like a 128MiB version I have tried. I hope this can be fixed with a BIOS setting because this severely cuts down the use cases of this device. DSL will run, and if you can mount parts of your file system over the network I'm sure you can get anything to work, but it would be nicer to have all of it's software on board.

Geeh, the content of my website is already here

Post by **PeterFalk** » Sun May 11, 2008 2:31 pm

I tried to extract the files out of the NK.bin with the uneizo tool, but it doesn't work (Found file: #9786;, length: 0xB46C300 Error: No memory to buffer file). You made the offering to send the upgrade files via email. Is it possible, that you send me the rar file to "a n w i e s e @ g m a i l . c o m" ?!

Thank you very much!

Greetings
Peter Falk

Post by **MindBender** » Mon May 12, 2008 12:38 pm

NK.bin already is the file you need; There's no need to extract it any further. Just replace the one that's already on your CF card with this one. The file is basically the Windows CE operating system and a small RAM disk in a single file. Please read the topic.

Post by **Maertin** » Wed Jul 23, 2008 2:26 pm

If you are missing wbtwizrd.exe, just rename btwizrd.exe to wbtwizrd.exe and all is well.
I have upgraded my eClient 630l to a 630ln and it works file.