Posts Tagged ‘ARM Cortex-A8’

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.

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.