A few days ago the Programmer's Hardware Database reached 10,000 hits, so it's time for me to think about what should be done next.
Recently I talked to a colleague and we talked about the computing performance of modern gaming consoles. He told me that there are even scientific articles on how these devices can be used to build high performance computing (HPC) clusters. I found some of these articles and some hardware information for these devices, like how to run certain versions of Linux on some of them. However, I never owned one of them. So if anyone has some kind of gaming console (Wii, PlayStation, Xbox - whatever) and is interested in some hardware hacking and maybe writing some toy OS / "Hello world!" code for it, please let me know. The articles I found mainly concern the PlayStation 3 and the Cell microprocessor therein.
Looking around for further devices to study I found that many smartphones, internet tablets, media players etc. use SoCs from (mostly Asian) companies I never heard of, like Rockchip or Allwinner, for which there are no officially released datasheets. However, since many of these devices use Android, it's often possible to dig through some driver source code to figure out how things work. Again, I never owned one of these devices (but I think about buying some tablet sooner or later), so currently this source code (and some datasheets "found" on the web) is all I have on these devices.
Finally, I examined some Linux driver source code used in my
TomTom GO 910, for things like the GPS unit, accelerometer, battery status and so on. They directly interface to some hardware registers of Samsung's S3C2442 SoC, for example, GPIO ports G and H or the integrated ADC. The interesting information one can get out of this source code is which pins of ports G and H are connected to the GPS unit, which ADC inputs measure acceleration and battery voltage, and so on. This information might be helpful for someone who wants to write a new driver (potentially for his own OS / some toy OS) for these devices. I'll probably put this on my wiki in the next days.