amiga-news.de - Report and pictures of the Colmar Multimedia-Expo

27.Oct.2008 Report and pictures of the Colmar Multimedia-Expo
Last weekend the Colmar Multimedia-Expo took place and Philippe Bourdin reports for Amiga-News.de and a gallery of the event can be found on his private website.

As a special highlight the Relec-team comprised of Emmanuel Rey and Sébastien Jeudy presented a kiosk system from KiOSKLiNEA / PASCOAL design at their booth. The system consists of industrial components like a vandalism-proof keyboard internals based on a SAM440ep. Additionally an infra-red touch screen was used, which was able to read the position of the finger (converted to the screen size) with a resolution of 32000x32000 pixels. The touch screen is available as a standard component with USB-connector and Windows-driver and will be physically mounted on top of a normal LCD display panel as an overlay device. AmigaOS 4.1 was installed in order to demonstrate the kiosk system.

Simon "Rigo" Archer created an OS4-driver for this touch screen in three days, without having access to the Windows-sources or the hardware documentation. Nonetheless, the driver has a very high resolution and is able work even with very fast movements, which can be transposed relatively easy with the hardware-accelerated compositing in AmigaOS.

ACube Systems was also present at the booth and showed the Minimig-board amongst others. For future developments, Philippe "Elwood" Ferrucci said in his presentation at the presentaion booth that ACube is happy about the public interest in SAM440ep and that the SAM440ep-flex (sometimes shortened as "SAM 1.5") will become available in the next few months. SAM440ep and the flex-variant (with 3 PCI slots but no onboard graphics) are the current product line-up and which will include the Flex available in the near future.

In principle, the target for current and future developments are the embedded market because of the advantages of the SAM support of light-weight operating system like AmigaOS and Linux. In particular the low power consumption of around 20 watts, the low operating temperature around 40 °C and the possibility for absolutely silent machine without any moving parts are best suited for special needs of certain applications in that area. Together with two Ethernet connectors even routing applications are possible. ZigBee and ccTalk are among the many variations that are perfect for industrial application customers.

The SAM440ep-flex will be bundled with AmigaOS 4.1 and Relec will offer it in the already known REL80 case (picture), because the TheRedOne case (picture) is only suited for the SAM440ep. There are negotiations going on for additional software bundles like the one with "Word Me Up XXL".

Whilst talking with Hans-Jörg and Thomas Frieden, the current priority in development of AmigaOS has clearly been formulated to finish the SAM-version of AmigaOS as soon as possible. This will then be delivered (including the SAM backplates) cost-free for previous customers. A new SDK for AmigaOS 4.1 is expected around December time that is going into beta testing very soon and will presumably include the gcc compiler 4.2.4 as well as Cairo header files. After these steps there is still work ongoing with Blender and some other project that is still not publicly announced on purpose.

Costel "Cyborg" Mincea is currently working on network drivers and would like to see new developers become involved on a Bluetooth project. Other important projects may include an AmigaOS version of wxWidgets that would ease a port of AudioEvolution. For applications like GIMP, a wrapper for GTK+ is helpful, since Cairo 2.8 is supported as a backend. Interested programmers are very welcome to apply to join.

Stéphane Guillard is currently working on a SATA 2 driver and "command queuing", which works quite similar to SCSI-reselect on the classic Amiga. One of his wishes would be a developer, who could work on a Firewire harddisk driver, which should not be a too challenging task, but first USB-2 on AmigaOS has the more priority.

Furthermore Jean-Francois "Voxel" Bachelet of the Voxel Amiga Shop and Jean-Jacques Boulet of the Amiga Reper Center have been there and were taking CyberstormPPC cards and AmigaOne boards for repair.

Unfortunately, the state of an OpenOffice-port is unchanged, basically whilst there was huge interest, no developer team for such a big project could yet been formed.

Additionally the Relec booth has had, beside the SAM systems, Pegasos and Efika systems running MorphOS 2 which could be tried out by the visitors.

Finally, a worthy mention of RMS Communications, who were surprised by the big public interest in their business software, for which they have been awarded the "Trophées de l'innovation" (innovation award) in the software category. The author Christoph Pölzl worked for around two and a half years on this hobby project, which can be seen as a competitor to SAPs SME-software (info) containing address database, project administration, purchasing, raw materials and finished product stockkeeping, accounting and in future even an internet shop as well as HTML and PDF export. The software is based on MUIbase, which is continually being improved by Steffen Gutmann.

The Colmar Multimedia-Expo has shown a lot of entertainment electronics, but Relec and ACube have built up some promising business contacts, and were very pleased with the outcome of the show.

The Amiga-News.de team wish the best of luck and much success to all participants! A special thank to Simon Archer for his help for the translation! (dr) (Translation: dr)

[News message: 27. Oct. 2008, 14:10] [Comments: 0]
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