I have my webpal opened and have gotten the thing to boot as it was intended. My power supply didn't work when I plugged it in. No Ac voltage on its output. I ended up connecting 5Vdc to C15. Connect it to the side closest to the voltage regulator (LM323) and use a screw on the voltage regulator for ground.
The unit only drew 0.75 Amps upon power up. I watched it boot to the startup screen, then shut down and removed the 1Mbyte flash code module. Then I power it up and got nothing, as expected.
The modem is an ISA modem card, with settings of COM2, IRQ3.
My box came with 8MB of DRAM instead of 4MB like the manual says. It is a SEC KMM5321004CVG-6 memory module. The chips on it are SEC KM44C1004CJ-6. A quick search with google finds that these are still around, if you wanted to upgrade you 4MB versions.
The box could be 2/3 of the size it is now if they had used a DC power supply instead of AC, and gotten rid of the smart card.
I am wondering about J11 and J10. These headers are not populated, what do you think they are for?
Also the oscillators are 24, ~14, and ~22 Mhz. Nothing higher. There are references in the processor datasheet to 32, and 64Mhz. What's up with that? Since the processor(it really shouldn't be called a processor it really is a System on a Chip design) is not socketed the best bet for improved performance is getting the clock speed higher.
So as far as booting options go:
1) Using the IDE header by clipping pin 11 on U2. Load your IDE drive with a precompiled kernel for this machine's hardware.
2) Re-Flashing the 1Mbyte memory module with your own code. This requires a chip programmer. And a very small footprint OS.
3) Get an IDE network card that can grab an image off the network and boot the machine from that.
4) If J9 is a floppy connector and you have a network card installed with a hard drive. Make a NetBSD boot floppy for ARM7 on a differnt machine. Then try to boot your webpal with a floppy. If it recognizes the drive and boots the floppy, you could do an FTP intall of NetBSD on the hard drive.
Be carefull how you power up the drives, etc. The LM323 only has a max of 3Amps output.
Here are some links:
Voltage regulator
http://www.national.com/pf/LM/LM323.html
System on Chip
http://www.crystal.com/design/products/overview/index.cfm?DivisionID=6&SubdivisionID=29&ProductID=118
DRAM Simm
http://www.usa.samsungsemi.com/admin/production/globalsearch.asp?key=kmm532*
Floppy/Parallel/Serial/ISA/IDE Controller
http://www.smsc.com/main/catalog/fdc37c665gt.html
VGA-NTSC/PAL encoder
http://www.chrontel.com/products/7001A.htm
Audio
http://www.cirrus.com/design/products/overview/index.cfm?ProductID=28
Buffer
http://www.fairchildsemi.com/pf/MM/MM74HCT244.html
Tranceivers
http://www.fairchildsemi.com/pf/MM/MM74HCT245.html
The Atmel part is just a programmable logic device for the Smartcard, so no reason to include that info here. It is pretty much useless IMHO.
