[ARM® Cortex™]: Anyone play with the beagleboard yet?

[second_exodous]

I was wondering if anyone has gotten Gentoo on the beagleboard up and running.

I'm not sure how easy they are to get a hold of, but the Open Pandora project uses the beagleboard with a gpu capable of opengl. Here are the specs for those not wanting to click on the link:

* ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
* 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
* PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
* 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
* Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
* Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
* Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
* 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
* Around 10+ Hours battery life

It will be out in a month or so, it sounds like the guys making it are doing it out of their basement, which is cool. There are tons of youtube videos, I have no idea what Linux they will be running, but if it's possible I'd like to get rid of what they have and run Gentoo on it.

I'm a n00b, I've been running Gentoo for years now but still hit snags and so fourth, so I'm not comfortable doing this on my own. Anyone want to get one at the same time as me and try this out? I thought maybe this would be a cool toy to get if you can't use Freerunner in your country.

I feel like I'm going to get some pretty negative responses, but I have to remember that the Gentoo forums are what switched me to Linux.

Just a thought,
Stan

[poly_poly-man]

crossdev an arm toolchain, build a stage tarball (or hope someone's done that), and make sure the bootloader will talk to the kernel.

No biggie...

Oh, and ask that pandora project for driver sources/binaries - it should run just fine, but it might take extra to support opengl.

EDIT: wait a minute - these are two different projects, with two very different sets of hardware... right?

poly-p man

[second_exodous]

Well, they are, but they used the beagleboard as the reference for their design. As far as I can tell they use all the same hardware, so whatever works for beagleboard will work for the Pandora.

[orvtech]

are there any advances on this topic ?

[FHavlak]

I purchased a Technologic Sysems TS-7800 ARM9 based SBC, the dev kit includes a completely functional and setup Debian installation. Pretty slick package.

It's going to be my main source of computing power for several robotics projects.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/boa ... ct=TS-7800

[orvtech]

I purchased a Technologic Sysems TS-7800 ARM9 based SBC, the dev kit includes a completely functional and setup Debian installation. Pretty slick package.

It's going to be my main source of computing power for several robotics projects.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/boa ... ct=TS-7800

just out of curiosity ... why that one instead of a beagle board ?

[FHavlak]

I purchased a Technologic Sysems TS-7800 ARM9 based SBC, the dev kit includes a completely functional and setup Debian installation. Pretty slick package.

It's going to be my main source of computing power for several robotics projects.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/boa ... ct=TS-7800

just out of curiosity ... why that one instead of a beagle board ?

Well, for starters I didn't see the beagleboard until now, and it looks like a decent alternative, but there are a couple reasons I'd probably still go with the TS-7800.

First, there exist a good number of daughterboard peripherals that operated on the PC 104 bus. For my projects I am anticipating having to manage a large number of sensors, and with the TS-7800 I can just add a daughterboard that has 24 12 bit ADC channels, that I can communicate with at 2 million samples per second.

Second, even with a PC 104 bus taking 64 pins of the 104 pin connectors, I've got a ton of general I/O pins available.

Third, before I purchased I had a few questions. My emails were answered by engineers in a very timely manner, and this is after they knew I was a hobbyist and not some guy planning to order ten thousand units.


That said, the beagleboard has advantages also:

dedicated I2C and SPI available ... easy high-speed communication with peripheral devices. It'd be fairly easy to go to digikey and find the parts you need to put together a simple many-channel ADC to communicate over I2C or SPI. It'd also be easy to get a ton of analog out channels that way. on the TS-7800 I don't have dedicated I2C. I can implement it in software and use one of the GPIO pairs, but I wouldn't be able to achieve the speeds that a dedicated I2C bus would. Instead, I'm mucking around looking at usb -> spi or i2c solutions.

Cheaper.

Faster processor (although I think that even the 500 mhz ARM9 will be overkill for what I'm working on).

At a glance, the beagleboard has better documentation.

I don't know. If I had known about the beagleboard, I might have gone with it. Hell, if I have a ton of problems with the TS-7800 I might grab a beagleboard anyway.

Looking at the beagleboard wiki, it looks like what's currently available (rev b) from digikey has a number of issues. If I decide to get one to play with it'll be after the community is sure that everything works.

[viridior]

There is a project underway to get Gentoo on the pandora, still alpha since the pandora is not even out yet. https://launchpad.net/gentoo-arm-pandora

[ssvb]

I just got gentoo installed my new beaglebord revision C (now it has 256MB of RAM and USB host added). Actually it wasn't a big accomplishment in any way because the process of installation is just as easy and straightforward as installing gentoo on desktop. There is ARM stage3 tarball available on gentoo mirrors.

It seems to be running fine and the amount of RAM is just enough for everything. It can be used as a normal desktop PC without any kind of embedded/crosscompilation magic