Posts Tagged ‘ARM’

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.

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.

Txtr : Open digital reading platform

March 16th, 2010

txtr reader is product of Txtr, Berlin based company engaged in building tools & services for digital reader.
Interesting part is, txtr provides hardware details of txtr reader device. It is based on Freescale i.Mx31 SoC which contains ARM11 processor core.

Txtr aims to integrate digital reading tools & services, while service can be used on various platform, having own open platform attracts community to also launch services on txtr platform. It can also encorages existing device vendor to integrate txtr service on there platform.

Reader hardware consist of Bluetooth, Wifi, Near field communication & EDGE modem to communicate with device. Interface such as, 3D Acceleratormeter, Touch screen based Eleectronic ink display, vibrator motor makes it more attractive platform for developing entertainment applications.

Note: Device is not available as of date.

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.

Neuros OSD2 : Open Internet Television Platform

January 30th, 2010

Neuros Technology offers Open Internet Television Platform with simple aim to bring internet to TV. Neuros OSD1 was first in this series of product, which was upgraded to OSD2 with better functionality.

Neuros OSD2 is based on Texas Instruments Davinci Series of SoC TMS320DM6446 having ARM 9 processor core. It has capability to be used as capture AV content as well as playback content from USB storage device or network. OSD2 developer guide contains good list of available resources.

Pro:

- One can efficiently use Neuros OSD2 for Personal Video Recorder or Network Media Player.