I first saw the Yopy last year sometime when someone posted some pictures
from one of the conferences. I wasn't sure it would see the light of day
since I hadn't heard much about it. I happened to come across some
information that they were now selling development kits and figured it was
time for me to get into the embedded world. Hey, this is already more
powerful than my first PC. I ordered the kit directly from their
web site and
got it shipped the next day from South Korea.
Got my Yopy development kit though customs after filling out an FCC
form and waiting a couple of days for it to clear. You'll need to provide
your phone number so they can call you to fax you the paperwork to get the
unit through customs.
The box got banged up a
bit, but everything inside seemed to come through ok.
The kit comes with
a docking station, ear phones, power cable, serial cable, and a CD-ROM.
I was hoping for a manual, but it's in PDF format on the CD. I'll have to
print a copy out and go through it.
My pictures are a little blurry since the camera doesn't work very well
getting close to the Yopy.
The left side has several buttons - including
a "record", "esc", "mp3", "pims" and what appears to be a volume control.
There's also what appears to be an infrared port. The right side has the
earphone jack, the top has the compact flash slot, and the bottom has the
rs232 connection and power jack. The Yopy has a nice solid feel to it,
although I'm going to have to get a case so the screen doesn't get
scratched.
The Yopy comes with a few standard applications that PDA's can be expected
to come with. There's an address book, a task list (todo list),
a scheduler, small paint program, an mp3 player, and one game (reversi).
These applications are very nice to look at - although I thought the scheduler
was a bit klunky when trying to enter information into it.
a web browser, an mp3 player,
The calendar application has a one day, seven day, monthly, or yearly view.
The whole year fits on the yopy screen and although I can read it fine,
I suspect many of the visually impaired might have a problem reading the
screen since I get complaints at work when other people read my screens running
at 1280x1040 using 8 point fonts. I see the screens fine, but others
probably need to have their prescription updated.
The mp3 player looks nice, but I haven't tried it out yet.
This screenshot shows the main applications menu on the Yopy. There is a
dialer, but it seems to only support up to 19200 baud. That's another
thing to experiment with - can I telnet to my pda. Heh. Heck, can I
run a web site on my pda?
Of course, a Linux system isn't complete unless you can view the processes
running on the PDA. I was amused to see many of the standard Linux
processes running, including "init".
I'm impressed so far. I have yet to wander on the CD and see what's on it.
The CD seems full of documentation and programs so I'll wander through it
next. Two things I didn't find on the Yopy unit that I expected to find.
The first was an xterm or some kind of shell.
I wanted to take a look at the file system and wander around
and see what was available. The second was an application that provided more
system information. I could not tell how much memory is available or how much
flash is available. I suspect these are on the CD since I did see something
that looked like an xterm, but hard to say.
You can send your comments and questions to [email protected] and I hope
to answer them in the next few days as I start to hack the Yopy.
