Archive for the ‘Development Platform’ category

BeagleBone

October 31st, 2011

BeagleBone is open hardware platform in line with BeagleBoard having AM3358 microprocessor based on ARM Cortex-A8 core. Design of BeagleBone is done with approach of supporting CAPS. CAPS are add-on boards which can be develop over a period of time as per additional peripheral requirement. This is pretty much in line with Arduino‘s shield concept. Priced at 89 USD, it’s quite affordable with the kind of features it is providing. But it misses on board display support such as VGA, DVI-D or HDMI.

Design material (Schematic, Gerber, BoM etc) for BeagleBone are available here.

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Posted in ARM Core, ARM Cortext-A8, Development Platform, Sitara, Texas Instruments

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RHINO : Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for Computing and Radio

August 12th, 2011

Reconfigurable Hardware Interface for Computing and Radio (RHINO) is open source hardware project primary targeted to students and researchers in Software Defined Radio (SDR) domain. It has powerful Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA (XC6SLX150T) and Texas Instruments ARM Cortex-A8 based AM3517. Although, quite a few similar open source projects are ongoing such as

- Casper ROACH (Reconfigurable Open Architecture Computing Hardware)

- High Performance SDR

- Products from Ettus Research LLC, such as USRP N200, USRP E100 and USRP1 (Yes they come with schematic.)

But, RHINO looks quite impressive with kind of peripheral it provides. RHINO schematics can be found here, but at current moment gerber (PCB layout) is not available, hope developers do publish them eventually. Borph Linux runs on RHINO platform.

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Posted in ARM Core, ARM Cortext-A8, Development Platform, FPGA, Sitara, Texas Instruments, Xilinx

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Arduino

December 29th, 2010

Arduino is most active and successful open hardware project. One of major reason is simple hardware and simple language to program with flexible and easy-to-use modules.
Person having basic electronics knowledge can start with Arduino in an hour or so. Furthermore, Availability and price of Arduino boards is major advantage. Plenty of country has local vendor (including some having multiple vendors.) The add-on card such as blue tooth shield or Wi-Fi shield makes it more usable. Arduino forum and wiki are best place to get any help related to Arduino.
Based on exact purpose of project, you can select best Arduino hardware. Ethernet, Xbee and motor shield can be quite useful for experiment. Typical Arduino core has ATmega series chip-set.

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Posted in ATmega, Atmel, AVR, Development Platform, System On a Chip

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openPICUS : Wireless Controller

April 9th, 2010

openPICUS board is very simple board with great idea, connect sensor/actuator on one end & wireless modules on other end of PIC micro controller.

open-picus logoOne of the design will have WiFi, while other will have Bluetooth as wireless module on openPICUS board. To make things simple to implement, openPICUS team have used 2 layer circuit design.

Board contains Microchip PIC24F 16 bit chip set for processing. Sensors such as temperature, accelerometer, flow detector can be interfaced to PIC. The readings of firmware can be done using wireless link. The firmware should directly download from serial port.
PIC24F has I2C & SPI interface, which can be used to for LCD display. PIC24F has 4 Analog Inputs with 10 bit A/D, 5 Digital Inputs (3 can be used as Interrupt) & 5 Digital Outputs (3 can be used for PWM) which is fair set of IO to interface desired sensors & actuators.

Pros:
- Simple design with good IO capability
- Wireless support

Update:
- openPICUS now provides port for FreeRTOS.

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Posted in Development Platform, Microchip, PIC

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Hawkboard

April 3rd, 2010

Hawkboard, similar to Beagleboard is open hardware platform for developer community. It uses OMAP L138 SoC, which contains ARM9 processor core along with floating point DSP. AM1808 is similar chip-set but with only ARM9 core.

Hawkboard logo

The board has direct serial console connector for debugging.  Board has VGA, USB Host & Gadget, SATA, Audio IO peripheral options, making it useful for various home & industrial application.

Pros:

- Angstrom Linux distribution supports hawkboard. Besides that, users have successfully used Android on hawkboard.

- Both cores, ARM9 & Floating point DSP of Hawkboard can execute upto 456 MHz, which is fairly good processing power.

- VGA video output makes easy to connect to low end display device (e.g. CRT monitor).

- Fairly good price of 110 USD.

Update: Hawkboard’s recent batch has some hardware problem. Although solution is published, some users are still reporting problem. So do take this into account.

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Posted in ARM 9, Development Platform, DSP, OMAP Series, Sitara

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Micro 2440 & Mini 2440 from Friendlyarm.net

March 8th, 2010

FriendlyArm has two boards, Micro 2440 & Mini 2440 based on Samsung S3C2440A SoC which contains ARM9 processor core.
Both board have common 64 MB SDRAM, NAND & NOR flash, LCD interface, Touch panel interface, camera interface, Ethernet & Audio In/Out, RTC, SD Card slot, Serial port & JTAG for debug & one USB device port.
While Micro 2440 has 1 USB Host, Mini 2440 has 4 port of USB Host. [Detailed comparison]
FriendlyArm also has 3.5 & 7 inch LCD & VGA board for expansion. Also USB Wifi & CMOS camera module is available as extra accessories.
Linux, Android & Win CE 5 & 6 support is available, which should be very handy. Schematics, User Manual & Data sheets are also available. Forum to discuss about board is quite active.
Quick Pros:
- Good form factor with compact design.
- 400 MHz is fairly good clock rate & device should be use full for hand held application.

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Posted in ARM 9, ARM Core, core, Development Platform, Samsung, System On a Chip

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