A.3. Overall Impressions of the KuroBox

In a word: disappointment. Very disappointed.

I like the PowerPC architecture, always have. I've been fond of it ever since it just a rumour. I've been looking forward and hoping for a moderately-priced, open, PowerPC-based embedded device for development purposes -- this is not it. It's not even close.

The KuroBox is being hailed as an open development platform. The mere fact something runs Linux doesn't automatically imply it's an open development platform. Take, for example, the serial console port. It isn't populated. Even once you populate the connector and the required resistor you still don't have anything that's useful because you now have signals that are only 3.3V and inverted. You still need additional, external logic in order for it to be usable. Then there's the JTAG port which requires a surface mount resistor pack, not something everyone's going to have handy. Provided you've tackled these hurdles you still need specialised, closed hardware to connect to the JTAG which only works with Windows (R) software.

There's no board bring-up, boot-monitor, bootloader (or whatever you want to call it). Therefore if you happen to install a bad kernel your whole box has now been rendered useless. In other words, don't bother trying to develop for this board, just use the tools provided and be happy. This is not an open development system. You can play in user-space all you want, if you mess something up just reformat the HDD on another machine and you're ready to start over. Mess up the kernel? You're out of luck. And if you wanted to ignore all that and still work on the kernel, you don't have a serial console, so you just have to reboot, wait, and hope it all worked out well enough and that your telnet server will start up soon.

If that's not enough, the KuroBox features an ATMEL chip in it that controls many aspects of the running device. For example, if you don't perform specific communications with this ATMEL chip it will simply shutdown your box after a short period. No information regarding this ATMEL chip is officially published.

In short, the search for a cheap, open, PowerPC-based development system continues.