BeagleBoard.org at ELC and SCaLE

It has been a big week for BeagleBoard.org. The next generation BeagleBone has been teased with a page open for registering interest. Matt Richardson created a teaser video and I showed off the board at ELC connected to an Motorola Lapdock to act as a monitor, keyboard, mouse and power supply. Victor Meyerson was also letting people know about the next-generation BeagleBone and provided BeagleWall, Motorola Lapdock and other demonstrations at SCaLE 11x where he was selected as the "Most passionate .org booth!"

Here's Matt's video about the upcoming BeagleBone:

Here are some pictures that Victor took at SCaLE showing the BeagleBoard.org booth with BeagleWall and Motorola Lapdock demos. The second picture shows a USB touchscreen connected to a BeagleBone using upstream kernel drivers for both the display (displaylink) and touch (e2i) portions as well as Xorg drivers provided by xf86-video-fbdev. Thanks again Victor (calculus on #beagle)!

Now is a great time for BeagleBoard.org and a great time to get involved. I am looking for more contributors to:

• the mainline kernel effort with patches being staged at http://github.com/beagleboard/kernel,
• support for the mainline kernel for doing physical computing in JavaScript at http://github.com/jadonk/bonescript,
• improvements to the distro used to make the boards useful out-of-the-box at http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/building-angstrom and
• support in any of Linux distribution or other operating systems.

Join us at http://beagleboard.org/discuss and get involved today! I'll be posting requests for contributions to our Google Summer of Code ideas page soon.

Update: I corrected the blog post to say "most passionate" not "favorite" and added the link provided by Russ Dill.

BeagleBone and Linux seeking cure to hardware black magic

Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E) 2012 wrapped up last week in Barcelona. By far, the most popular embedded platform of choice for demonstrations was BeagleBone. Here are four examples that include links to the slides taken from the eLinux wiki ELC-E presentation page. Videos of the presentations should be available from Free Electrons soon.

Matt Ranostay opened up the presentations with "Beaglebone: The Perfect Telemetry Platform?" where he explored various telemetry applications such as weather stations, radiation monitors, earthquake detection mesh networks, home security systems and entropy pool generation. He discussed sharing data with tools like COSM and the hardware and software he developed for his own Geiger Cape plug-in board.

Alan Ott of Signal 11 Software followed up with an excellent overview of "Wireless Networking with IEEE 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN". Alan discussed the power consumption of various wireless communications technologies, security and much more, including what is supported in Linux. Alan wrapped up with a demo using BeagleBone and an ultrasonic range finder. Dave Anders snapped a picture of the Altoids-tin encased demo.

Matt Porter of Texas Instruments stepped away from sensors and controls bringing back the Commodore 64 demoscene with "What's Old Is New: A 6502-based Remote Processor". While this might seem like a bit of a throw-back, many modern issues and solutions were explored to give us this taste of the past, including the Linux remoteproc/virtio interfaces to remote processors, the AM335x PRUSS processor that is extremely adept at bit-banging and the Fritzing design tool.  Matt has also shared a picture of his wiring handy-work.

Finally, Koen Kooi of CircuitCo presented on one of the fundamental BeagleBone challenges, "Supporting 200 Different Expansionboards: The Broken Promise of Devicetree". If you frequent #beagle, you probably already know that Koen isn't easy to please and so the title shouldn't be much of a surprise. You might then be surprised to note on the first slide where "broken" has been scratched out! We certainly aren't there yet, but the device tree maintainers and AM335x kernel developers are starting to address the unique opportunities around BeagleBone cape expansion boards in the mainline Linux kernel, making a reality out of the dream of supporting hundreds of boards with a single kernel distributed ahead of the add-ons!

The continued enthusiasm of the embedded Linux community is just one element of what makes BeagleBoard.org successful, but it probably makes me happier than any other. With many of these developers moving the state of the Linux kernel ahead and even looking at sharing their hardware ideas in the BeagleBone Cape Plug-in Board Design Contest, I see a bright future where the largest collaborative software project of all time fully embraces the hardware and maker communities such that we can build a world where individuals and even children can reproduce electronics and computers down to the circuit level, not simply build on black magic.

Problems with Google (Groups)

What is up with Google?  We have hundreds of messages waiting moderation on the BeagleBoard Google Group, but the tool no longer enables message moderation---and absolutely no communications from Google.  Have they simply bitten off more than they can chew?  Are they trying to take too much control?  Either way, I'm shopping for a new mailing list solution for BeagleBoard.org and, sorry, 99% of your suggestions aren't useful.  We need low-setup costs, low/free hosting, long-term archival, excellent search tools and results in various engines, quality spam controls, easy-to-use moderation tools, forum-like thread organization and "top-pinning", digest and individual e-mails with threading and many more features for which Google Groups has barely been passable at this point.

Any thoughts on why this has happened and if Google will be a valid partner in the future?

BeagleBoard on The Amp Hour and at ESC Boston

This week, I went on the Amp Hour with Chris, Dave and Jeff.  We spoke about a lot of things BeagleBoard related, including the upcoming next revision of the BeagleBoard.

Also, I wanted to remind everyone that there will be new hands-on training at ESC Boston this month and full-conference attendees will get a free BeagleBoard-xM, TinCanTools Beacon Board and TI MSP430 Chronos watch.

Lastly, I'm still on the look-out for a new primary host for the BeagleCast podcast.  I will be recording another episode next week with Khasim Syed Mohammed regarding the Android Rowboat project (hopefully), but I'm looking for someone who can volunteer to organize and record/publish the shows on a regular basis.  The audio recording must be of higher quality than we've done in the past.

BeagleBoard turns 3.0!

Three years ago this week, Digi-Key announced the BeagleBoard.  Since then, BeagleBoard-xM was launched and numerous other distributors have also signed up to deliver the BeagleBoard and BeagleBoard-xM all around the world. 

Linux is turning 20 years old this year and Linus has released version 3.0.  You can try 3.0 out on the BeagleBoard or BeagleBoard-xM prior to rev C and it should work for you pretty well.  Support for xM rev C was merged after the 3.0 release for inclusion in 3.1.  If you'd like to pull a patch set that gives you power management, 1GHz support and some other features not yet placed into the mainline yet, you can check out the patch set in the meta-texasinstruments OE repository.  Koen also has also released a set of pre-build binaries and modules using these kernel patches if you want to try out a fairly full-featured 3.0 kernel build for the BeagleBoard/BeagleBoard-xM.

I haven't tried it out yet, but the Linaro 11.06 Android evaluation build also includes a 3.0 kernel for your BeagleBoard-xM.

Happy Beagle 3.0!!!!

BeagleCast 2011-05-06: Talking ARM with Greg K-H

Today we interview Greg Kroah-Hartman and your hosts are Jason Kridner and Jeffery Osier-Mixon. Gerald will be back in two weeks.

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

Links to show topics

• Some in stock @ Digi-Key this week!   
• A 300ms BeagleBoard boot?   
• Using git submodule and busybox to track mainline development
• Announcing the Level One eXpansion (LOX) Board   
• BeagleBoard at Embedded Linux Conference (CATCAN, Gumstix Stagecoach, SuperJumbo, Avnet, and WLAN hacking)   
• Always Innovating talk at the 2011 Embedded Linux Conference    
• Sandia cluster of 49 OMAP3s   
• TI introduces OpenLink   
• Processing and Processing-JS on the BeagleBoard under Angstrom   
• BeagleBoard based oscilloscope using JavaScript and Processing.JS    
• Arduino IDE and upload with avrdude to Trainerboard (AVRISP2)   
• Processing on Beagleboard xM   
• Making Processing/Arduino IDE/ReplicaorG work on ARM    
• Android Oscilloscope on the Beagleboard xM using Rowboat   

Upcoming events

• Maker Faire Bay Area, May 21-22, 2011
• ESC Chicago, June 6-8, 2011
• Stompbox Design Summer Workshop at Stanford University, July 18-July 22, 2011    

The Greg K-H interview is roughly the last 15 minutes.

Indiana Linuxfest and the CATCAN quadpod

I was at Indiana Linuxfest this weekend. A couple of BeagleBoard-xMs were raffled off in support of the conference and it seemed a lot of people were interested. I gave a brief talk about the BeagleBoard project, Mark Yoder from Rose-Hulman and his students gave hands-on training to those interested in the Hackerspace Village and we had a BeagleBoard.org table for part of Saturday.

On Friday before I left for the show, I got a package from CATCAN in Taiwan containing two BeagleBoard-based robots and not much else; certainly nothing else I understood. I left the hexpod at home to make sure it wasn't damaged and took the quadpod with me. Sitting at the table, a group gathered and we figured out what we thought was the right way to connect the battery. The first thing we noticed was this ominous shrill after applying power. As we sat nervously wondering what was going to happen when we applied power, one person sitting at the Linux in the Ham Shack table noted a resemblance of the bot to the evil metal spiders in Dr. Who.



We decided that the shrill was likely the fans in the servo motors. You can block it out after a while, but it is loud and frightening. There was some concern that this meant that the servos were under strain, especially given that the motors were all moving themselves in addition to the legs, but I'm pretty sure we ruled that out and it really is the fans.

Knowing from the CATCAN and BeagleBoard.tw websites that this bot was running Android, a random group of us sitting around the table decided to hook up a serial port and tried to figure out what made the bot move. Being Android without any additional GNU utilities in the file system, the shell can be a bit frustrating. We couldn't hit backspace or perform tab completion. However, obvious commands, like 'ls', 'cd' and 'cat' are there so we could go about our exploring.

One of the first files we found was a log in /data/dontpanic. We found that quite reassuring. Eventually we found /system/etc/init.hexapod.sh and the fact that it pointed to executing /data/test-long-time-hexapod. Sure enough, running that executable sent our bot back through its motions. Running it from the shell gave us a printout of 13 different numerical values--the same number of motors on the bot. Eventually, I'll need to figure out how to recharge this bot--unless I have somehow underestimated its capabilities. I'm still a bit away from figuring out how to give it my own directions, but I think I have a start now--thanks to the attendees of Indiana Linuxfest!

It wasn't all games on the show floor, I also enjoyed a few of the talks. I especially enjoyed the presentation on Open Hardware by Joshua Burton. I am anxious to figure out what I can do with a Bug or BeagleBoard and the realtime sensor data aggregator Panchube. Joshua also introduced me to the work of Rodney Brooks who, among other interesting things, contributes to Edge.

I also picked up a bit I didn't realize in the Ubuntu for ARM presentation by David Mandella. One thing that surprised me is that the 10.04 release for ARM isn't considered "LTS" or long term supported. David predicts that the 12.04 is likely to be the first LTS release for ARM. With the Linaro work on the device tree and lots of OMAP/BeagleBoard patches being accepted into the mainline Linux kernel, I expect that to be a stellar release for the BeagleBoard users out there.

The presentations were recorded, so hopefully I'll be able to provide an update with the recorded presentations.

Update (3/30/2011): Sog Yang gave me this link to find a charger: http://www.rc-airplanes-simplified.com/rc-battery-chargers.html