BeagleBoard

New home for BeagleBoard.org blog

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 12:42:00 -0500

I've moved this blog to http://beagleboard.org/blog. It just seems like an easier place to find it. I'm also going to try to start being more consistent with at-least-weekly posts.

BeagleBoard.org celebrates 5 years of enabling Linux DIY hacks

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 16:45:00 -0500

BeagleBoard.org launched with support of Digi-Key in 2008 and DIYers quickly adopted BeagleBoard for migrating XBMC to ARM, building GPS accurate down to the centimeter, eight-legged robots and creating controller hacks. In 2010, Google Summer of Code students contributed numerous projects to help other open source developers, including sniffing USB traffic and XBMC performance optimizations. GSoC students are back at it again in 2013, providing solutions for booting BeagleBone from aNexus phone, running Arduino sketches and even building new peripherals out of an on-chip microcontroller.

With the introduction of BeagleBoard-xM in 2010, projects accelerated with homemade tablet computers, open graphing calculators, cluster computing in abriefcase,repurposed laptop LCDs, remote presence and versatile RC robots, space cameras, USB killswitches and wearable LED matrices. BeagleBoard-based wearables back in 2010 even provided a strikingly similarity to today's Google Glass.

BeagleBone launched in 2011 to the cheers of robot makers everywhere, even robot makers looking to replace guide dogs and soothe the everyday angry bird, butinventiveness wasn't limited to awesome, futuristic robots. The tiny, low-power processing solution enabled tidy home power usage monitors, off-the-grid wireless outposts,QR code controlled door locks, networked LED marquees, portable 3D cameras and even cameras that would print scene descriptions in words. BeagleBone's portable performance was utilized for countless goals, including cracking passwords, manufacturing money and helping to save the world from pollution.

BeagleBone seemed to find a surprising home in retro computing, mimicking PDP11 blinkenlights and saving dot-matrix printers from the dust bin. This seemed to be an inspiration for inventive minds seeking to teach others about the more subtle capabilities the board is packing. The two, small 200MHz 32-bit microcontrollers on-board were used to mimic external peripherals to a discrete 6502 processor, enabling more people to understand the capabilities of these independent units previously demonstrated performing independent generation of VGA signals using a simple resistor ladder.

The tutorials continued with everything from twiddling an LED and running Ubuntu with a full GUI, to extracting video signals and wiring up your own LIDD displays, evenbuilding your own dedicated Pandora radio. This is all before BeagleBone Black launched, boosting performance to 1GHz, adding on-board eMMC and HDMI and dropping the price down to $45.

BeagleBone Black is just getting its legs underneath it in its initial production run of 125,000 units with around half of those shipped so far. Early adopters were able to share some of their creations at Maker Faire, including LED strips being used to display live video. Beyond the obvious and popular lighting solutions, BeagleBone Black has found an early home in manufacturing solutions, especially with makers like Elias Bakken, who created the contest-winning Replicape 3D printer-enabling add-on board and a tiny HDMI display for use with BeagleBone Black, and Charles Steinkuehler, who has created the MachineKit software image containing LinuxCNC and Xenomi real-time Linux kernel. Both Elias and Charles have been steady contributors to the project of late and have helped enable several of the improvements making BeagleBone Black a complete and easy to use solution for all sorts of makers.

As of the recent June 20th software release for BeagleBone Black, significant improvements have been made since launch. Monitor support is greatly improved with better automated resolution setting and a documented process for setting specific resolutions over the command-line or at boot-up, including resolutions up to 1920x1080 at 24fps. The node.js-based BoneScript library, used in such fun things as multi-room physically interactive video games, has several bug fixes and a growing body of interactive wiring examples that work within Chrome and Firefox browsers. Support for the on-board 32-bit microcontrollers called PRUs has been improved with an updated assembler and documentation supporting previously undocumented instructions, including multipliers, and hints have been made at a C compiler being developed, including Pantelis Antoniou's example of using the PRU C compiler to add 32 additional channels of pulse-width modulation (PWM). The value of aggressively chasing the mainline kernel is also being shown with simple command-line statements for enabling UARTs, SPI, I2C, CAN and more peripherals, including improved cape add-on board support.

With an amazing community, stand-out performance and capability, a true open hardware approach that is sustainably profitable but not greedy, continuous demonstrated improvements and a focus on educating aspiring engineers and hobbyists alike, BeagleBoard.org has proven to be a DIY force with which to reckon and an inspiration for makers everywhere. Happy Birthday Boris!

BeagleBoard.org GSoC 2013 update

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 23:18:00 -0500

In the last blog post, the students and mentors were introduced and links were given to the projects. The Minix I2C project shared a video for the last post and has progressed as far as pushing initial I2C support into the Minix mainline. A couple of the other students have now provided some videos describing their projects.

First, the Beagle-ROS project...

...and now a bit on the project to add IIO support to the Linux mainline for the BeagleBone Black ADC...

The Userspace Arduino project has also made some excellent progress, demonstrating running Arduino sketches on BeagleBone Black...

The BeagleBoard Android Boot project has also produced successful bootloading from a Nexus phone.

BeagleBoard.org Google Summer of Code 2013 -- coding starts this Monday, June 17

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:11:00 -0500

BeagleBoard.org is just about to kick-off coding on our second time as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. This is an amazing program that pays students for writing open source software over Summer. Seven (7) students will be participating in projects that advance the state of open source software for Beagle users and will earn them each US$5,000 if they are successful. Twenty-three (23) qualified mentors from the BeagleBoard.org community have volunteered to help the students reach their goals.

Each project has a page on BeagleBoard.org giving a bit of a description of the project linked in the table below. Each of those pages in turn links to blogs where the students will update the BeagleBoard.org community on their progress. Most of the daily collaboration will be happening on the #beagle-gsoc IRC channel, including weekly status meetings, which are all being logged. The nicknames of each student and mentor are included in square brackets in the table below, so you can contact them with any feedback you might have. You might also choose to join the BeagleBoard-GSoC Google Group for related announcements and additional technical discussion on the projects.

Each of the projects is rather interesting and you'll be able to read more about them here in the weeks to come. Scroll past the table below for a video describing one of the projects, the development of I2C drivers for the Minix operating system.

Project	Student	Mentors (* = primary)
Minix I2C drivers for the BeagleBone Black	Thomas Cort (Heritage College in Canada) [tcort]	Kees Jongenburger* [keesj], Ben Gras [beng-nl], Frans Meulenbroeks [effem]
Arduino for userspace Linux	Anuj Deshpande (Pune Institute of Computer Technology in India) [hatguy_] and Parav Nagarsheth (Nirma University in India) [anujdeshpande]	David Anders* [prpplague], Matt Porter [mdp], Andrew Bradford [bradfa], Luis Gustavo Lira [lglira]
Android-based boot system	Vlad Victor Ungureanu (Jacobs University Bremen in Germany) [vvu]	Vladimir Pantelic* [av500], Tom King [ka6sox], Kees Jongenburger [keesj]
Software Defined Peripherals: JTAG/Debug via PRU	Jon Bailey (University of Waterloo in Canada) [jj2baile]	Tom King* [ka6sox], Andrew Bradford [bradfa], Pantelis Antoniou [panto], Hunyue Yau [ds2], Matt Ranostay [mranostay]
IIO, ADC, PMIC, LCD debug/patchwork	Zubair Lutfullah Kakakhel (University of Leeds in UK) [ZubairLK]	Greg Kroah-Hartman* [gregkh], Koen Kooi [koen], Vladimir Pantelic [av500], Tom Rini [Tartarus], Laine Walker-Avina [Ceriand]
Beagle-ROS	Víctor Mayoral Vilches (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain) [vmayoral]	Koen Kooi* [koen], Khem Raj [khem]

One of the students has already posted a video describing their project and all of the students will eventually provide video presentations of their projects, so stay tuned if you want to be video-spoon-fed.

Thanks to Thomas for providing that video. Of course, there are several other individuals involved in supporting this year's Summer of Code, including, but certainly not limited to:
Our mentors-at-large: Derek Molloy (general BeagleBone) [molloyd], Mans Rullgard (ARM) [mru], Karim Yaghmour (Android), Russ Dill [Russ], Jason Kridner (BeagleBoard.org GSoC administrator) [jkridner] and
Our backup administrator (and all around amazing person): Cathy Wicks [cwicks].

Thanks to everyone for their participation and support. Looking forward to an amazing Summer!
--Jason

BeagleBone Black was a huge hit at Maker Faire!

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:15:00 -0500

I'm on my way home from Maker Faire and I am still in awe that Beagles where everywhere! Clearly, BeagleBone Black is quickly becoming the embedded computer of choice for makers of all types. To start, BeagleBone is on the cover of Make Magazine and the huge banners of the magazine cover at the show. Within the enclosure of the OpenROV open hardware underwater remotely operated vehicle kit and ocean exploring project, you can just make out the outline of an included BeagleBone!

Above on the left is the cover of Make Magazine and on the right is Eric Stackpole sharing
with a young explorer at the show what the OpenROV community has made.

Back on land, one of the physically largest, or at least tallest, exhibits at the show is also driven by BeagleBone. Benjamin James of coolneon.com about his BeagleBone based LED wall. The wall consists of over 1,000 LEDs fed by an SPI serial port from BeagleBone. BeagleBone is also performing animations and he even has a massive scale Tetris implementation written by Christopher De Vries where kids share the controls and need to cooperate to succeed. He's also got a mode that uses another computer connected to a Kinect camera to feed information to the BeagleBone such that the LED wall can be "conducted" as if in a concert. Benjamin is a huge BeagleBone fan looking to bundle up his LEDs and BeagleBone-based controller so that anybody can make some incredible light displays.

Above on the left is a picture of the BeagleBone-based LED exhibit to the left of a full concert stage. On the right is an interview I did with the maker, Benjamin James.

Benjamin wasn't the only one showing off LED lighting solutions using BeagleBone and sharing source. Paul Stoffregen of DorkbotPDX out of Portland, Oregon has a BeagleBone Black based LED display solution fed by stomp pads connected to his affordable Teensy microcontroller modules, a webcam and his open source software. Openness and performance were huge factors for Paul as he tried using another popular low cost computer and found it was dropping frames. That non-Beagle computer simply didn't have the performance he needed and he found it dropping frames---all problems that went away using BeagleBone. Another factor for his choice is the consistent build quality he's found using boards from Circuitco and BeagleBoard.org. He did much of his development on his laptop computer and was able to move his code over to Beagle without any hassles in about half-a-day. He also notes that BeagleBone Black ships with the video-4-linux (V4L) drivers that enabled easy use of a webcam to drive his LED array. You can read more about his experience on his dorkbotpdx blog post about getting ready for this event.

Above is a quick interview I did with Paul Stoffregen about his BeagleBone Black based LED display.

I was able to grab a couple of other quick interviews with BeagleBone Black users at Maker Faire, including Marcus Schappi of Ninja Blocks and Edouard Lafargue who built a model train exhibit. Both of these users are running Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular desktop Linux distribution, on BeagleBone Black (as opposed to the Angstrom Distribution image shipped with the boards). Because BeagleBone Black runs armv7 instructions, it can run the latest Ubuntu builds for ARM. Both of these projects are focused on connecting sensors and controls to a web interface. There are great community write-ups on getting Ubuntu installed on BeagleBone Black.

On the left is an introduction to Ninja Blocks. In the middle is a quick interview I did with Marcus Schappi of Ninja Blocks at Maker Faire. On the right, Edouard Lafargue shows off his BeagleBone Black based web controlled train.

In addition to the ability to run Ubuntu, Edouard chose to use BeagleBone Black thanks to the project's true open nature including an open hardware design where he can get all of the design materials and documentation, and not need to use any closed binary blobs to boot his hardware. Porting his application from his Mac to his BeagleBone Black was simply taking only about half a day.

I spent much of my time at Maker Faire running around with my BeagleStache moustache camera running OpenCV. Below is a quick stache tweet I captured of Brian Jepson in the Maker Shed. While I was there, I also checked out the stock of BeagleBone Black. They didn't put out the BeagleBone Black boards until Sunday, but that didn't keep them from selling out before I managed to get back again. They also had a kit I haven't seen on-line yet that was $65 and included a pre-release preview of Matt Richardson's book "Getting Started with BeagleBone: Linux-Powered Electronic Projects With Python and JavaScript" and several other goodies including multiple breadboards and LEDs. The kits sold out as well.

At #makerfaire? Give @jadon your card for the chance to win @beagleboardorg #beagleboneblack or #badtothebone! twitter.com/BeagleStache/s…
— Boris Houndleroy (@BeagleStache) May 18, 2013

I had many great discussions with other people showing me their BeagleBoard.org related projects including stuff they had now and stuff they were creating. A tremendous thanks to Hunyue Yau for doing so much to educate people about BeagleBoard.org with his BeagleBone-based ProtoBone Android tablet prototype. Hunyue focused his booth on BeagleBoard.org activities and answered question after question after question about BeagleBoard.org and BeagleBone. He was also kind enough to share his space with a couple of volunteers from Ansync Automation, Sam Miller and Tom, who partnered up with Uncanny Vision to demonstrate a BeagleBone-based robot using Ansync's motor controllers and Uncanny Vision's UncannyCV. They created a really cool and powerful color tracking robot that gave dozens of aspiring young makers joy in following them around on the expo floor and making its R2-D2 sound effects.

Above on the left is Hunyue Yau's ProtoBone BeagleBone-based Android tablet prototype. On the right is a video of Tom describing the Ansync BeagleBot.

Another huge thanks goes to Drew Fustini, who frequently played host to Jessica and I, introducing us to many of the great makers that he knows and bringing the whole Texas Instruments crew out to Jeri Ellsworth's Bring-a-hack event. Drew brought a hack he got from the BeagleBoard.org community: an RF spectrum analyzer running on BeagleBone Black with a USB connected $25 receiver.

Above on the left is Drew Fustini. In the middle is a picture he took of the TIers going to Jeri's Bring-a-hack event. On the right is the RF spectrum analyzer Drew demonstrated at the event.

The whole experience was once in a lifetime and I never want to miss another Maker Faire. If you've ever thought about making something, anything, I really, really encourage you to register your idea on beagleboard.org/project, tell people about it on Google+ and the BeagleBoard.org Google Group getting their collaboration as needed, then propose it to one or more of the upcoming US Maker Faires or even the inaugural Maker Faire Europe in Rome still accepting applications until June 2nd. Happy Beagling!

BeagleBoard.org at ELC and SCaLE

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:12:00 -0600

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

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 10:53:00 -0600

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)

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:30:00 -0500

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

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Tue, 6 Sep 2011 11:02:00 -0500

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!

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:17:00 -0500

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

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:53:00 -0500

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

Links to show topics

Upcoming events

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

Indiana Linuxfest and the CATCAN quadpod

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:35:00 -0500

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

BeagleCast 2011-03-25: Super Jumbo

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 15:30:00 -0500

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

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

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

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:57:00 -0500

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

Links to the recordings

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

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

Future topics and guests

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

BeagleCast 2011-03-07: The inaugural podcast

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Tue, 8 Mar 2011 15:37:00 -0600

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

Links to the recordings

To provide questions or suggestions:

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

Jeff and Yocto

SD card discussion

BeagleBoard and electronics hobbyists of all ages

News from the BeagleBoard.org RSS feed and elsewhere

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

Using Perl to read Linux events

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:19:00 -0600

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:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$ENV{'DISPLAY'} = ":0.0";
system("xhost +");
#system("totem --quit");
#system("nice -n -5 totem --fullscreen /home/root/playlist.xml &");
$cmdline_start = "nice -n -5 mplayer /home/root/*.mov &";
system($cmdline_start);

open(FILE, "/dev/input/event0");
binmode(FILE);
while(1)
{
eval
{
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die("Alarm!\n") };
alarm(60*28); # 28 minutes
read(FILE, $buf, 16);
alarm(0);
};
if($@)
{
printf("Restarting due to timeout\n");
#system("totem --next");
system("killall -15 mplayer");
sleep(1);
system("killall -9 mplayer");
sleep(1);
system($cmdline_start);
}
else
{
($time1, $time2, $type, $code, $value) = unpack("iissi", $buf);
printf("%f %05d %05d 0x%08x\n", $time1+$time2/1000000, $type, $code, $value);
if($code == 276 && $value == 1) # USER button pressed
{
printf("Restarting due to USER button press\n");
#system("totem --next");
system("killall -15 mplayer");
sleep(1);
system("killall -9 mplayer");
sleep(1);
system($cmdline_start);
}
}
}

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

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 11:00:00 -0600

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

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 15:39:00 -0600

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

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Thu, 9 Sep 2010 11:48:00 -0500

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.

Announcement from TI of BeagleBoard-xM hands-on training at ESC Chicago

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Mon, 24 May 2010 15:39:00 -0500

Get hands-on training with the new BeagleBoard-xM, June 7-8 at ESC Chicago

Attend ESC Chicago, June 7 & 8, and get hands-on interactive training with the new BeagleBoard-xM and talk with industry experts as they give you all of the hardware, boot, and kernel basics required to start development immediately. Attendees will learn how to engage with the BeagleBoard developer community, as well as how to obtain and utilize the source code projects most fundamental to the boards functionality.

For those actively developing there will be targeted classes available addressing:

Streaming media
Graphical user interfaces
Embedded Linux
Android development for non-handset designs

Register Now for ESC Chicago

Sessions and kits are FREE to registered BeagleBoard workshop attendees. Arrive early, as space and board availability is limited.

Come and experiment with the BeagleBoard-xM to see what new ideas it sparks in you.

For more information or to order a BeagleBoard, please visit www.beagleboard.org
Click here to register for BeagleBoard classes at ESC Chicago.

SHARE THIS EMAIL

The platform bar is a trademark of Texas Instruments. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Six BeagleBoard.org GSoC projects launching

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Wed, 12 May 2010 11:43:00 -0500

BeagleBoard.org was approved to mentor six (6) students during this year's Google as they execute their projects. The students, projects, and mentors are:

Christopher Friedt's project is NEON Support for FFTW. He is being mentored by Mans Rullgard. I'm proposing Philip Balister as a co-mentor. Christopher attends C.A.U. Kiel, Germany. You can follow his work at http://perpetual-notion.blogspot.com/.
Tobias Arrskog's project is Optimizing rendering of XBMC and aiding the port to ARM. He is being mentored by Mike Zucchi. I'm proposing Mans Rullgard and Søren Steen Christensen to assist as co-mentors. Tobias attends Lunds University, LTH. Sweden.
Yaman Umuroglu's project is RPC-like POSIX wrappers for DSPEasy. Yaman is mentored by Katie Roberts-Hoffman. I'm proposing Laine Walker-Avina and Frank Walzer to assist as co-mentors. Yaman attends Middle East Technical University in Turkey.
Varun Jewalikar's project is a High level interface to exploit the Pulse Width Modulation abilities of the BeagleBoard. Varun is being mentored by Søren Steen Christensen. I'm proposing Cristina Murillo to assist as a co-mentor, but I'll be looking to see if we can add a co-mentor in India. Varun attends Delhi College of Engineering in India.
Nicolas Boichat's project is a USB sniffer on Beagle Board. Nicolas is being mentored by Hunyue Yau. I'm proposing Laine Walker-Avina and Frans Meulenbroeks to assist as co-mentors. Nicolas is finishing his Masters at EPFL (Switzerland).
Pramod Poudel's project is OpenCV DSP Acceleration. Pramod is being mentored by Leonardo Estevez. I'm proposing Katie Roberts-Hoffman and Luis Gustavo Lira to assist as co-mentors. Pramod attends University of Texas at Tyler, Texas, USA.

Thanks all for each of the roughly 60 proposals submitted to BeagleBoard.org!! I hope that you'll continue to participate and will consider submitting a proposal again next year. There's been a bit of a lag in the weekly sponsored projects. Boards should be in the GSoC students' hands this week, so I hope that you register your project there to still have the opportunity to get a board and execute your idea.

From the GSoC timeline, we are currently in the Community Bonding Period and very close to launching our projects:

Community Bonding Period:	Students get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their projects.

May 24:	Students begin coding for their GSoC projects; Google begins issuing initial student payments provided tax forms are on file and students are in good standing with their communities.

Every student should be in contact with his/her mentor and co-mentors on a regular basis. This Monday, May 17th will be an all-hands meeting on #beagle at 14:00 UTC / 10AM EDT.

P.S. Mentors registered with GSoC, please contact me if I don't have the roles defined adequately--I don't mind adding additional co-mentors.

Ubuntu image writer simplifies getting start using the BeagleBoard

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Wed, 7 Apr 2010 14:35:00 -0500

If you happen to have a 2GB SD card and you are thinking about trying the Angstrom demo that Koen has created but are scared of all the partitioning, formatting, and copying instructions you are finding on the web, then I hope I'm about to share some joy with you.

Ubuntu now distributes a tool for writing images onto USB sticks and SD cards for the purpose of evaluating Ubuntu. For those of us who use Linux on a daily basis, it serves largely the same purpose as the 'dd' command, but it runs in Windows and Mac OS X as well and has a GUI to help prompt you along the way. You can get the tool from:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromImgFiles

Additionally, Koen, a maintainer for the Angstrom Distribution, has produced an image under his demo directory at:

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beagleboard/sd-images/2gb/

You'll still need a tool to uncompress the image (which is Bzip2 compressed), but the rest should be mostly self-explanatory. Hopefully other distributions will follow and more SD images will be available soon!

BeagleBoard.org in Google Summer of Code!

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:44:00 -0500

BeagleBoard.org has been listed as one of the accepted mentoring organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2010!!!

Over 365 organizations applied and we are among the 150 lucky Free and Open Source projects that were accepted. About 1,000 students are expected to have their project proposals accepted and Google will be providing US$5,000 to every student and US$500 to the mentoring organization for every successfully completed project. Texas Instruments will be providing BeagleBoard hardware through the BeagleBoard.org Sponsored Projects Program. TinCanTools has offered to provide Zippy boards to students using those in their projects.

Now is the time for mentors (people who would like to assist the students), to sign up on the GSoC2010 site and to update the ideas list. It is also the time for students to get familiar with the BeagleBoard.org project and community before applications begin being accepted on March 29, so be sure to hang out on the #gsoc and #beagle channels on irc.freenode.net.

Spread the good news and bring on the projects!!!

Several OMAP/Beagle patches land upstream for Linux 2.6.33

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:17:00 -0600

I'm feeling pretty happy and excited today looking at the patches Linus Torvalds has recently merged into the Linux kernel mainline, such as a huge patch set from Tony Lindgren[1]. I'm particularly happy to see that DSS2 is there[2], so there shouldn't be any more confusion about what display driver to use on OMAP. The USB EHCI (host port) driver also finally got merged[5]. I also see a large number of power management patches being included.

Baseline support for several OMAP3 systems has also been included, including the Always Innovating Touch Book[3], AM3517 EVM[6], IGEPv2[7], CM-T35[8], OMAP3630 Zoom-3[9] and some updates for the OpenPandora[4]. Many of the OMAP3 development boards[10] and open development platforms are still not listed or easy to find in the Kconfig descriptions or board instance files.

A large number of bug fixes are also included.

It typically takes Linus 2-3 weeks to put together the first release candidate. After that, it typically takes 2-3 months to hammer out the bugs enough to make the the release. I'm looking forward to seeing great testing and contributions from the OMAP and BeagleBoard communities following the release of Linux 2.6.33-rc1!!

[1] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=9c3936cb694ffd559c80dc3eb75b61f769a39259
[2] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/arm/OMAP/DSS
[3] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=7a079cab4632265fc87ee483daf57879d5dd87f2
[4] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=8d88f7f70cca3fa6aabac287fccd40cebacb92d1
[5] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=54ab2b02ef6a454b4cca969f546d0dd43fec7308
[6] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=c625327e2f5a506a89563e14ed837c82fa61548f
[7] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=58e111621d402d41cb0cabae7c532d6194b7d943
[8] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=2886d128d8ff83af88b9cbe6dbf7f0d2bbee8d76
[9] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=5f35fbe8b8a05743fb9686e33194a126cd4273f6
[10] http://wiki.omap.com/index.php?title=OMAP3_Boards

Videos of intro to Nov 17th community lightning talks and all the Aug 27th talks

beaglecast@beagleboard.org (Jason Kridner, Gerald Coley and Jeffery Osier-Mixon) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:39:00 -0600

See the full list of movies in the YouTube playlist. They include OMAP3-based open platforms like the Always Innovating Touch Book and the Oregon State ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) OSWALD, software frameworks running on OMAP3 like Gnome, Ubuntu, GStreamer, and QNX Neutrino, projects for open software defined radio (SDR), hardware projects to expand Beagle with LCDs and Ethernet, the DM355-based open camera project LeopardBoard.org, and new applications like the PicoFlamingo presentation system.

To see the slides or join the Nov 17th event, visit the wiki page. Enjoy!

BeagleBoard

New home for BeagleBoard.org blog

BeagleBoard.org celebrates 5 years of enabling Linux DIY hacks

BeagleBoard.org GSoC 2013 update

BeagleBoard.org Google Summer of Code 2013 -- coding starts this Monday, June 17

BeagleBone Black was a huge hit at Maker Faire!

BeagleBoard.org at ELC and SCaLE

BeagleBone and Linux seeking cure to hardware black magic

Problems with Google (Groups)

BeagleBoard on The Amp Hour and at ESC Boston

BeagleBoard turns 3.0!

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

Indiana Linuxfest and the CATCAN quadpod

BeagleCast 2011-03-25: Super Jumbo

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

BeagleCast 2011-03-07: The inaugural podcast

Using Perl to read Linux events

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

Looking for a college intern for this summer

BYOES at ESC Boston

September 20-21 at ESC Boston

Announcement from TI of BeagleBoard-xM hands-on training at ESC Chicago

Six BeagleBoard.org GSoC projects launching

Students get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their projects.

Students begin coding for their GSoC projects;

Google begins issuing initial student payments provided tax forms are on file and students are in good standing with their communities.

Ubuntu image writer simplifies getting start using the BeagleBoard

BeagleBoard.org in Google Summer of Code!

Several OMAP/Beagle patches land upstream for Linux 2.6.33

Videos of intro to Nov 17th community lightning talks and all the Aug 27th talks