BeagleBoard

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.

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.

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

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.