THE MAGICAL BOARD

I want to share with you the information we got, about Beagle board from the program 'EMBEDDED LINUX TRAINING WITH BEAGLEBOARD. We missed the first session as we were a little late due to the traffic block in Banglore town.




Beagleboard is an Ultra low cost, high performance, low power OMAP3 based platform. I was amazed to see the functioning of that small board. It's a tiny 3"-3" USB powered board. Mr. Khasem an team demonstrated the working by connecting the standard input output devices to the board and showed us it's various functions. They played movies, music etc through that small board.




It's secondary memory is a 4GB SD card. It has 128Mb of DDR RAM and 256 MB NAND. We can connect any USB controlled device through it's high speed USB 2.0 OTG. There is port for connecting monitor, key board and other peripherals. It has also a TV out (S-Video) to connect it to the Television. It also provides a slot for stereo in and out.



In the after noon session they showed us how to make the board working. First they cross compiled the boot loaders u-boot and x-loader for the ARM processor. After that they started the cross compilation of linux kernel and drivers for the board.

The beagle board is intended for low power applications and don't require a complex embedded hardware development system. Instead, the beagle board uses standard, desktop computer peripherals.



They use open source softwares u boot and x loader as the boot loaders, Linux operating system and file systems. Free tools such as compiler for ARM and DSP and utilities to flash on board NAND are also available. The cost of this magic board is rs 9999/-.

India sales:
beaglesales.india@cranessoftware.com.

The important links given to us:

Complete Technical reference manual for OMAP3530 processor is open and freely accessible to all

http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/gencontent.tsp?contentId=36915

Software is made open and freely available to all,
*DSP LINK(for ARM-DSP communication),
https://www-a.ti.com/downloads/sds_support/targetcontent/link/link_1_50/index.html

*Validation software, Linux device drivers, latest kernel from GIT
http://code.google.com/p/beagleboard/wiki/BeagleBoardDiagnostics

* Linux drivers are being submitted to kernel.org mainline to be in sync with latest Linux kernels

More info on http://muru.com/linux/omap

*Board schematics
http://www.beagleboard.org/uploads/BBSRM_B5.pdf

*Tools

*DSP compiler
https://www-a.ti.com/downloads/sds_support/targetcontent/LinuxDspTools/download.html

*ARM compiler
http://www.codesourcery.com/gnu_toolchains/arm/portal/release313