Personal Media Corporation announced on June 25 that it would begin marketing via direct sales as of that date a new T-Engine development kit with a CPU board based on Hitachi Ltd.'s SH7751R microprocessor, which uses the SH-4 core. Hitachi's previous T-Engine development kit, "T-Engine/SH7727 Development Kit," uses the SH3-DSP core. The new "T-Engine/SH7751R Development Kit" (click here for a photograph), which is priced at 195,000 yen (consumption tax not included), is the seventh T-Engine development board implementation (five T-Engine implementations and two µT-Engine implementations) to be marketed by Personal Media. The hardware and software specifications of the T-Engine/SH7751R Development Kit as as follows:
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| CPU | SH7751R (SH-4 core, 240 MHz) |
| Flash memory | 8 Megabytes |
| SDRAM | 64 Megabytes |
| LCD | TFT color 240 x 320 dot, touch panel, key SW x 3 |
| I/O interfaces | USB (host), PCMCIA card, serial, eTRON chip, headphone output, microphone input, LCD I/F, Ir remote control, tablet I/F, expansion bus I/F |
| Other functions | Real-time clock (RTC) |
| Power source | AC adapter |
| External dimensions |
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A hardware option planned for sale in the future is a LAN board. The software
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| T-Monitor | Standard T-Engine monitor |
| T-Kernel | T-Kernel/OS (Operating System), T-Kernel/SM (System Manager), T-Kernel/DS (Debugger Support) |
| Basic middleware | File management function, command line interpreter (CLI) |
| Managers | PC Card manager (bus driver), USB manager (bus driver) |
| Device drivers with source programs | RTC, console (serial), screen (LCD), system disk (ATA, CF Card, USB), KB/PD (keyboard, touch panel, mouse) |
| Sample programs | Simple disk partition creator (hdpart), disk formatter (format), file contents comparer (cmp), disk dump (dd), simple line editor (ed) |
The standard development environment for the T-Engine/SH7751R Development Kit is the GNU-based development environment (including source debug "gdb"), which runs on top of PC-Linux. A software option is Personal Media's multilingual GUI development kit, "PMC T-Shell/7751R Development Kit."
As a result of an upsurge in interest in the TRON Project in general and the BTRON subproject in particular, Personal Media Corporation began marketing on June 3 via direct sales "Cho Kanji Note T2," a notebook personal computer with the BTRON3-specification Cho Kanji 4 operating system and bundled applications preinstalled in it. (Click here for a photograph.) The new 1.07 kilogram notebook computer, which is also equipped with MS Windows XP Professional in separate partition, uses a low-power Intel Pentium M microprocessor running at 900 MHz and the Intel 855GM chipset. It is equipped with 256 megabytes of SDRAM, a 40 gigabyte hard disk drive, a 1,024 x 768 dot full color TFT LCD screen, and a 100BASE-TX/10BASE-T LAN card (Wi-Fi is also built in, but can only be used with MS Windows). The sales price of Cho Kanji Note T2 is 219,000 yen (consumption tax not included). For further information and purchase details, please contact Personal Media's Sales Department.
In a related development, Personal Media announced on June 19 that it had agreed to actively cooperate in the "Einstein Project," a non-profit organization established in 1998 to reduce waste by recycling discarded personal computer equipment to needy school districts and welfare organizations for the elderly and handicapped. The company will do this by supplying free of charge copies of the BTRON3-specification Cho Kanji 4 operating system for installation in discarded personal computers donated to the Einstein Project. The first recipient of these computers will be Shinmei Primary School, which is in the town of Ago-cho located in Shima County of Mie Prefecture. The Cho Kanji 4 equipped personal computers will be put into operation in the second semester of 2003 after being optimized for primary school use and connected to an LAN inside the school. Cho Kanji 4 is well suited to this application of recycling of old personal computer, as it is very compact and runs at high speed even on old hardware.
The Ubiquitous ID Center announced on June 23 that it had certified three ultra-small integrated circuit (IC) chips as standard ID tags for realizing Ubiquitous IDs in ubiquitous computing networks based on the TRON technologies. The three IC chips--the Hitachi µ-chip [myu-chip], the Toppan Publishing T-Junction chip, and the YRP UNL/U-Tokyo/Renesas Technology eTRON/16-AE45X--will undergo demonstration testing in the current fiscal year tracking vegetables from growing, through the distribution chain, and through retail outlets in Japan. These tests will conducted in cooperation with the Hayama Agricultural Cooperative and the Tokyu Store supermarket chain. Tracking of the ID-tagged produce will be possible using the T-Engine-based Ubiquitous Communicator developed at the T-Engine Forum to communicate with intelligent objects in ubiquitous computing networks. If the demonstration tests are successful, it is expected that agricultural production, distribution, and retailing will be greatly rationalized in Japan in the future.
