Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Software design contest #1



Shall we wrap-up the year with a BeagleBoard software design contest? The prize will be a Rev C1 BeagleBoard with a working USB EHCI port a couple months before they are broadly available.

Please don't be shy. I know there are a lot of interesting projects going on and you need to enter the contest to win!

More information can be found via the announcement on the mailing list. Reply if you have any questions. We are looking forward to your entries!

Enter soon. The first give-away will be the first week in January!

Blue ribbon acquired from WikiMedia.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Crossing 1,000 mailing list subscribers


Last week was a very busy one for Beagle Boarders.

We had hundreds of people sign up for the 4 days of Beagle Board training at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston. Class attendance for several sessions were at capacity and many of the classes were hands-on, including hands-on classes on 3D user interface creation and . Those attendees are now able to refer to the course materials for the hands-on classes on-line and all the people who signed up walked away from the event with Beagle Boards in hand. Many thanks to MontaVista, RidgeRun, Bill Gatliff, Special Computing, HY Research, Angstrom Distribution developers, and all of the others involved. It was an amazing event.


We also had great demos on the show floor, including BSquare's wireless demo running on the OMAP35x EVM, CalSoft's Flash demo running on the Beagle Board, and the Gumstix Overo running Angstrom. I also got my first chance to play with a DLP Pico Projector, which drew a nice crowd at the booth.

Additionally, those of you who have been waiting on documentation for the power management device, the technical reference manual (TRM) for the TPS65950 is now available on-line. This is a drop-in functionally equivalent replacement for the TWL4030 with some analog performance improvements, including to the on-chip USB PHY.

Almost forgot to mention that I got an article published regarding use of open source software in consumer electronics. Beyond using open source software in consumer electronics, I really believe there is a future for products like the Neuros OSD as people want more control and ownership over what their products can do.

Lastly, at the time of this writing, we are now only 10 people away from having 1,000 mailing list subscribers. Interest is overwhelming and continuing to grow. Thanks for making the Beagle Board such a success so far and helping to set the course of where it goes from here!

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Beagle at IBC


Lot's of activity going on around Beagle, but I've been lax on generating blog posts. In addition to the activity going on in preparation for ESC Boston, such as getting Sugar running, giving free trainings in India, and getting a new intern to watch the IRC logs, we also have our very own Roger Monk and Koen Kooi at IBC today. Stop by (IPTV zone IP322) if you want to take a look at the Beagle in action or simply hop on IRC and chat with them today while they are at the booth and logged into IRC using the Beagle board using nickname "beagle|ibc".

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

LugRadio Live UK 2008


Lugradio live 2008
Originally uploaded by koenkooi
The BeagleBoard.org community last weekend (July 19/20) showcased the latest beagle developments and capabilities at the LugRadio Live 08 Event in the UK. Koen Kooi (Open Embedded) and Måns Rullgård (FFmpeg) teamed up to deliver some stunning NEON accelerated High Definition video demonstrations and the latest ARM Cortex-A8 OE built Angstrom Distribution. Other demos included High Definition 3D graphics acceleration leveraging Beagle's Imagination SGX core and some C64x+ DSP accelerated audio and video codecs. Lots of great interest at the show in the capabilities of a such a 'small but powerful platform', especially when enabled by such a creative and dynamic community.

Koen also provided a handful of nice pictures from the event.

Edit (2008-07-29)--Linux Outlaws did an interview:

Friday, July 11, 2008

Trade Show News



The Beagle Board will making a number of appearances over the next few weeks. Our very own Khasim Syed Mohammed will be at OSScamp July 19th in Bengaluru, India. In the UK, Koen Kooi and Måns Rullgård are looking to show off FFmpeg and Ångström at LugRadio Live on July 19-20.

A BeagleBoard fan group has shown up on Facebook. Currently, only the upcoming LinuxWorld Expo event in San Francisco August 4-7 is listed, but it is possible to RSVP to express interest in the BeagleBoard meet-up. I'm expecting for details on the meet-up to be provided shortly. I look forward to meeting you there!

Thursday, June 26, 2008

LinuxTag 2008 winners

BeagleBoardBox

And the winners are...
  1. Sebastian Reschke
  2. Harald Krippel
  3. Ramiro Polla
  4. Kate Alhola
  5. Kees Jongenburger
  6. Eugen Dischke
  7. Davor Ocelic
  8. Robert Bohme
  9. Holger Wirtz
  10. Jan Luebbe
  11. Robert Schuster
  12. Florian Boor
Each of the winners has now been contacted and we're in the process of shipping the boards. My apologies for each of you who applied and were not selected in the drawing. Perhaps, you can possibly take another shot at LugRadio Live UK 2008 July 19-20 or at the soon-to-be-planned big BeagleBoard.org meet-up at LinuxWorld Expo 2008 August 4-7 in San Francisco.

And, for those of you who attended our first meet-up at TIDC 2008 back in February, when we first started this mission, we haven't forgotten you! Feel free to express your desire for an early adopter board at 'revb-request' at beagleboard.org and that will let us know you aren't interested in waiting for the platform to mature any longer.

Friday, May 30, 2008

The little things


It is the little things that make me happy sometimes, like Koen adding support for the Linux LED driver.

Several triggers are possible, such as accessing the NAND, MMC/SD, or just a regular heartbeat, as Koen has demonstrated. To list off the possible triggers for the LED driver:

root@beagleboard:~# cat /sys/class/leds/beagleboard\:\:led0/trigger
none nand-disk [mmc0] heartbeat timer

The above shows the MMC/SD access trigger enabled. Koen selected that by issuing the following command:
root@beagleboard:/sys/class/leds/beagleboard::led0# echo mmc0 > trigger
Get started adding your own drivers today by starting with the existing code and the kernel git tree. See http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard#Code (Thanks Dirk!) for references. The patch was discussed on the IRC channel here: http://www.beagleboard.org/irclogs/index.php?date=2008-05-30#T12:04:27.

Meanwhile, Sakoman and Khasim are continuing to to push ahead with the full NAND flash support. All these "little" activities really make me happy. :)

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Beagle Board at LinuxTag!


Texas Instruments is hosting the BeagleBoard.org booth at LinuxTag 2008 on May 28-31. You will see Beagle board live demos and discuss open source topics at the booth - Hall 7.2a Stand 122. On Friday, May 30th, there is a two hour workshop about the open source project in workshop room 2 at noon. More information on the event can be found at http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/en/home/welcome.html.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Friday, May 9, 2008

Distros for Beagle


Some may think of the Beagle Board as just another embedded eval board, but its capabilities lie much closer to those of a computer. And as a computer, Beagle needs an OS. Though we are already running Linux, and it’s fine, there’s still something missing. Beagle needs a distro.

On your PC you might use Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, or another distro out there, and Beagle needs one as well. Currently, Beagle is already running Angstrom (OE) (thanks Koen!), but why not get involved early and help Beagle run Ubuntu ARM (Mojo), Fedora ARM, Gentoo ARM, or even ARMedslack?



Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Beagle patches integrated in upstream OMAP community Linux kernel

Thanks to Khasim Syed Mohammed, the recent OMAP community Linux kernel now contains basic patches for the Beagle board! For initial boot of Linux on Beagle you don't have to apply any additional patches, just download the community OMAP Linux kernel using git, do "make omap3_beagle_defconfig", and enjoy booting your new kernel on Beagle.

Khasim is just getting us started. Expect to see other community members contributing patches to provide additional functionality on the Beagle board soon.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

LUGRadio Live USA 2008



A few people got to play with Beagle at LugRadio Live USA 2008. One attendee even did a small write-up in Chinese on Beagle and what else he saw at LRL. There was quite a bit of interest from many people who have never thought of "embedded/ARM" development before. I was a bit more surprised by how many developers are getting more interested in solutions that allow them to embedded their solutions, Linux and otherwise, into many new places as can only be done with small, low-power devices and boards.

My presentation, "The DSP is Open", is available on-line. Keep your eyes out for video posts to show up on the LugRadio Forums.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Source released for the Beagle Board

Khasim has provided us with the first Linux sources and binaries for the Beagle Board. You can find them on the Beagle Board code.google.com page under BeagleSourceCode. Feel free to stop by the IRC channel (#beagle on irc.freenode.net) or the discussion group to learn more. Happy hacking!