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Posts Tagged ‘Texas Instruments’

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

Tags: ARM ARM Cortex-A8 BeagleBone Sitara Texas Instruments

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

Tags: ARM ARM Cortex-A8 FPGA SDR Texas Instruments Xilinx

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.

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

Tags: ARM ARM 9 DSP Floating Point DSP Hawkboard OMAP Sitara Texas Instruments

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.

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Posted in ARM 9, Davinci Series, Product

Tags: ARM ARM 9 Davinci Neuros PVR Texas Instruments

Beagleboard

January 1st, 2010

Beagleboard is one of the most successful project in terms of community support & activity. It uses OMAP3530 soc, which belongs to OMAP35# series from TI. Many recently launched smart phones (such as Droid, N900, Palm Pre ) use similar kind of soc.

Besides having strong hardware, Beagleboard project also comes with all required data-sheets, schematics, layout & it is supported well by various Linux distribution, making it ideal plateform for embedded researchers & hackers. Lot of other hardware boards are available which are modified version of beagleboard.

Although, first impression of Beagle board hardware suggest that it is targeted to Mobile / Multimedia or entertainment device, It is practically very useful for many kind of application.

Quick Pros:

- ARM Cortex – A8 Core

- Standard interfaces such as USB, DVI-D, Serial console for debug, SD card slot

- USB Host & Gadget mode support, making it ideal for usb device driver development / testing and validation

- Supported by various linux distribution, in particular Angstrom includes various debugging tools, making beagleboard as strong reference platform of ARM Cortex-A8 for Application testing & debugging.

- Although (as of now) Open GLES driver is available in binary only format, it is fairly usable.

I would also suggest beagleboard to any one who is beginner in embedded Linux or college student for their academic project as platform.