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.