BeagleCast 2011-03-25: Super Jumbo

The theme of today's show is "Super Jumbo" and your hosts are Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon.

To provide questions or suggestions:

• Call +1-713-234-0535 or
• visit the BeagleCast suggestions form

Links to the recordings

• BeagleCast-20110325.mp3
• BeagleCast-20110325.ogg

Headline news

• Windows Compact 7
• Two new Distributors in China -- ChipSee -- CATCAN

From the RSS feed

• FFmpeg fork becomes libav
• Clojure on The Beagleboard -- What is a closure vs. what is Clojure?
• The 2.6.38 kernel is out
• What Is CLFS? - File System - Check!
• OpenEmbedded at CeBIT 2011 -- Should we still be excited about CES and CeBIT?
• Face chasing BeagleBoard-based robot using a Kinect
• How to build QT Framework 4.7.2 and OpenCV 2.2 for Beagleboard-xM -- How to build sample program for capturing image from camera (OpenCV and Qt)
• SPI with Trainer-xM
• Running CyanogenMod on BeagleBoard -- What is CyanogenMod? -- What is Rowboat?
• NEWS IGEPv2 goes Open Hardware
• Open Hardware Summit date announced for 2011? -- Looking for votes on a logo
• Beagleboard: Power usage (current draw) for certain scenarios

Upcoming events

• Indiana Linuxfest
• OpenSource COM BOF/LUG Mumbai Meeting, 26th March 2011

Community activity

• GSoC Update -- BeagleBoard.org not a mentoring organization this year -- Still looking for mentors to volunteer to mentor in other projects -- Considering a smaller scale BeagleBoard Summer of Code
• Always Innovating Announcement...Super Jumbo Beagle Buffet!

Upcoming

• Khasim Syed Mohammed will be on next week to discuss the Android Rowboat project

BeagleCast 2011-03-14: BeagleBoard-xM rev C

Today's hosts are Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon.  Below are the show note links.

Links to the recordings

• BeagleCast-20110314.mp3
• BeagleCast-20110314.ogg

To provide questions or suggestions:

• Call +1-713-234-0535 or
• visit the BeagleCast suggestions form

From the RSS feed

• Running a BeagleBoard off of Batteries   
• BeagleBoard cases with a MakerBot on Thingiverse
• New SGX Graphics Driver Release 4.03.00.02 for Linux now available!    
• DVI-D to VGA converter for BeagleBoard-xM and issue to be fixed with the current BeagleBoardToys VGA adapter when using a BeagleBoard-xM  
• Kinect + BeagleBoard-xM (now need GLES)    
• Leverett and Wasson Win Texas Instruments Beagle Board Design Challenge   
• Toolchain, Check! Kernel, Check! - Cross Linux From Scratch 

Twitter badge on the blog page

• Lots of interesting #BeagleBoard tweets
• Follow the #BeagleBoard RSS feed news items on Twitter 

Upcoming events

• Tweet @Jadon for free BeagleBoard hands-on training on March 26th at Indiana Linuxfest going on March 25-27
• Linux Collaboration Summit on April 6-8
• Embedded Linux Conference on April 11-13
• Maker Faire Bay Area on May 21-22

BeagleBoard-xM Rev C HW and SW Update

• New release candidate from Angstrom
• FAT vs. ext2
• boot.scr vs uEnv.txt change is not welcomed by all
• Why won't old MLO and u-boot work with xM rev C?

Hot Topics on the BeagleBoard Google Group

• Mark Yoder's ECE497 class with some students using the Kinect
• Collecting Google Summer of Code project ideas such as the car PC project

Future topics and guests

The theme music for BeagleCast was created and provided by Alasdair Drake.

BeagleCast 2011-03-07: The inaugural podcast

Today's hosts are Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon.  Below are the show note links.

Links to the recordings

• BeagleCast-20110307.mp3
• BeagleCast-20110307.ogg

To provide questions or suggestions:

• Call +1-713-234-0535 or
• visit the BeagleCast suggestions form

Jeff and Yocto   

• Jeff at a conference near the Columbia river gorge   
• Jeff now the Yocto community manager   
• Yocto includes Poky build tools, is multiplatform and has a BeagleBoard BSP   
• Yocto gets many new partners   
• What does it mean to join with OpenEmbedded?  
• OE and Gentoo share roots
• Arago Project    
• Koen working on the oe-core  
• eLinux wiki summary of embedded Linux projects   
• Wikis "are like bread" (good when fresh)   
• BeagleBoard.org and Google Summer of Code   
• oe-core status update and Yocto birds of a feather at ELC week of April 10

SD card discussion   

• Amazon selling consumer friendly packaging   
• SD card performance shootout needed to measure controller performance   

BeagleBoard and electronics hobbyists of all ages

• Maker Faire
• Getting Started in Electronics
• Capacitors explode
• 555 timer contest

 News from the BeagleBoard.org RSS feed and elsewhere

• Cloud9 IDE on BeagleBoard
• BeagleBoard Trainer-xM
• Contributing upstream patches, such as uEnv.txt patch in u-boot
• The move from ttyS2 to ttyO2
• linux-omap kernel patchwork
• Linaro status
• Linux news
• Linux input events in Perl
• Student Robotics has a nice BeagleBoard based robot design and real student roots 
• xM now available from Tenet Technetronics
• Koen made BeagleBoard coasters with his MakerBot
• Adobe Flash10.1 with DSP H264
• PIXHAWK Gumstix Camera
• BeagleWall with interview of Roger Monk

The theme music for BeagleCast was created and provided by Alasdair Drake.

Using Perl to read Linux events

For a simple demo that played a movie on a BeagleBoard, I wanted to add a simple mechanism to start the movie over again if the USER button was pressed.

To read a Linux input event, it is as simple as just performing a read. The only trick to this for me, however, is that I wanted the read to timeout. This was resolved by using the Perl alarm() function can catching the signal within an eval().

I've uploaded a gist of my example play_movie.pl script:

Vote for the winner in the TI/UT BeagleBoard Design Challenge

BeagleBoard UT Design Challenge! TI and UT Austin students step up to the challenge What is the most inventive thing that can be done on the BeagleBoard today? Students from the University of Texas at Austin have stepped up to the challenge to find new and unique ways to push the envelope, inspired by the BeagleBoard to break barriers of innovation. Which BeagleBoard-based design would you like to own? Vote for your favorite today! Voting takes place between January 27th – February 10th. To cast your vote, please view projects at ti.com/beagleboardchallenge. Think you can do better? Visit beagleboard.org to begin your own development.

Looking for a college intern for this summer

In the past, for job postings and other commercial solicitations around the BeagleBoard I've recommended utilizing the BeagleBoard LinkedIn group because I never went deeper than the page that said that the job board was free.  As I tried to list my own opening, I found that it was going to cost me almost $200.  Given that, I welcome anyone contacting me with information on cheaper ways to do job listings and other commercial solicitations related to BeagleBoard activities.

What I'm inquiring about here is to fill an ARM microprocessor community development team internship position at Texas Instruments for summer 2011.  You can find other job opportunities at TI with TI's CareerBuilder site (try keyword "Linux") or at http://careers.ti.com.

Job Description
Serve the needs of open source software developers utilizing TI ARM-based microprocessors by advocating within TI, consolidating and communicating valuable information internally and externally, and solving technical and organizational challenges including patches to fix open source software bugs or functional gaps in software like u-boot, Linux, applications within GNU/Linux distributions and tools to build software systems. Producing written, recorded and interactive presentation materials to train technical and semi-technical audiences on utilization and extension of open hardware platforms, such as the BeagleBoard, is required. A public reputation in open source software development is highly desirable. Some travel required. On-line communication skills are a must. This position is potentially very flexible in hours and location as long as mastery of communications with the core team can be demonstrated. Other potential benefits include flexibility in software projects and resources of perhaps the largest volume ARM microprocessor supplier in the industry.

Minimal Skills Required

• On-line communications
• Conflict resolution
• C and C++ programming
• Shell scripting
• Demonstrated knowledge in Linux, operating system and build system concepts
• Software revision control management
• Oral and written communications in English (additional languages are desirable, especially Japanese, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Hindi)

Company Description
Texas Instruments (TI) is a global analog and digital semiconductor IC design and manufacturing company. In addition to analog technologies, digital signal processing (DSP) and microcontroller (MCU) semiconductors, TI designs and manufactures semiconductor solutions for analog and digital embedded and application processing.

Where to send your information
Please send all TI ARM microprocessor community development job related queries to me with "JOB" in the subject heading and to my jkridner account on beagleboard.org.

BYOES at ESC Boston

Last chance to Register for BeagleBoard Workshop, Sept 20-21 at ESC Boston The two-day embedding training at ESC Boston, with BeagleBoard.org and Microsoft, is rapidly approaching. Don’t miss your chance to learn how to develop with Windows Embedded Compact 7 on the BeagleBoard-xM, a community-driven single-board computer.    Register Now     September 20-21 at ESC Boston Sessions are FREE to all paid conference attendees. BeagleBoards can be purchased for $150 during registration. Participants will have access to BeagleBoard-xM and an SD card that contains the distributions for the classes as well as demos, tools and more. To learn more about BeagleBoard-XM please visit us online. Buy a BeagleBoard-xM Kit for only $150* *Supply is limited.