Err, we're talking about an unpopulated board, that even with the software currently availible doesn't threaten their old business model for it. It's been discontinued in the US, and I'm guessing other countries as well. The only thing they could possibly complain about is using the words 'Mattel JuiceBox', as that'd be a trademark.Just call it a 'JB interface'and you should be OK.
I don't see at least one of your concerns; Mattel isn't going to care, since they have discontinued the Juice Box. I can't imagine Emsoft (the manufacturer) would care, since they have the uClinux source code for Juicebox available for download.
Mattel was just the company doing the production and marketing. emsoft still holds the rights to the design. from what i gather, they are still marketing the design for other uses. as i understand it from comments left in the code as well as references from other sources, emsoft uses the "guts" of the juicebox in atleast 2 other products.
So, if Mattel agreed, they produced the hardware, we give them the basic/standard firmware under GPL, so the units wouldn't come "blank", and would be a "failure proof" rom. "Developers" would be able to boot from blank nand's provided by Mattel (and yes, they could benefit a lot with this). The "basic" rom, would have tools to program the nands and to choose to bot from them.
Mattel is in the business of making toys. they are totally disinterested in doing anything more with the juicebox. emsoft would the only place to go for this, and they have made themselves very clear that they are not interested in working with the open source community.
I understand your concerns but I'm with ChrisSaw and Tom61 on this. As long as we aren't making an exact copy of the Juiceware or MP3 cart. or calling it an official Mattel product they shouldn't care.
thats just it, we can't guarrantee that the board would not be used to violate copyrights. recent courts cases such as the ones against P2P have stated that a product can be labeled "defective by design" when proper measures to prevent copyrights violations are not made.
Yes, closed source hardware is a problem. But you can buy an xD Card Association approved product point a heat gun at it or put it in your toaster oven and remove the socket. The smc to xd adapters are still available from several sources for less than $10.
yes that would work, but that presents a problem for mass production, how do you layout pads for an xD socket that you don't have? yea yo could do a layout for 1 easy, maybe even 2 different sockets. i personally have over 10 different types of xD sockets with all different pads.
Optional;
# NAND chip in addition to the xD socket (separate CE for each)
# Buffers for nWR and nOE
# SD/MMC socket
why both NAND chip and xD socket? you really only need one nand flash device to get the custom bootloader running. and why buffers on nWE and nOE? as far as the sd/mmc socket, thats a given, you need that to pull files from, but might i suggest you look into used a microSD card instead to save room.
how about a slot for smartmedia? seems those are just raw nand-flash too. or are those too obsolete?
yea they are too obsolete, they are limited on their size and are getting hard to find. but they also suffer from the same problem as the xD card. the sockets are restricted to members.
again, i'm not saying "don't do it", i'm playing devils advocate here. there are lots to think about when doing this kind of project.
