While searching for a processor with "oomph" today for a specific project we have in the pipeline here, I came across this little beauty which some of you may or may not be interested in.

beagleboard

The pricing on this board is remarkable, considering the 100 off price of the processor itself is around the $50 mark. It also features a rather neat technology called POP (package on package) where the ram chip is mounted on top of the flash chip on top of the processor (all BGA packages).

We bought a board to try, which in itself proved to be difficult because apparently the the the board is subject to export restrictions in the US and cannot be shipped to the UK! One phonecall later and we had to confirm we were not using it for military purposes and it's winding its way here!

Adrian

Hmm neat. Might have to see if I can acquire one to play with...

That is a good price considering it has a video card onboard. Does it have a host-USB? Otherwise there would be no way to hook up ethernet that I see which would be a disadvantage.

The web page clearly shows a USB2.0 host (OTG) port. And the documentation gives USB-to-ethernet as an example of something useful to connect to it (through an adapter cable or hub).

EDIT: apparently it does the high-speed 480mb/s flavour, too.

Cheers

The hardware manual could do with some proofreading. I've found several mistakes in it. Nothing major but it just makes it confusing when they suddenly refer to the wrong port or list the wrong component number.

A buddy of mine works on marketing for the CPU on this thing. They're aggressively courting hobbyists and open source hacker types. They want people to do wild and crazy stuff.

I'm just brainstorming to see if I can come up with a reasonable undergrad project around one of these things, because if I can, I'm pretty sure I can get a stack of them, gratis.

Mmm.. I wonder if the empeg player binary would run on one of these.. with suitable rewrites of a few kernel drivers, that is.

That would be a neat project.

I think the issue when this was last looked at was the DSP. You'd lose the equaliser and anything else which the DSP does itself.

So, primarily, the EQ. Plus other lessor things like FM demux, and, for that matter, the mixer (radio, mp3, aux).

Mmm.

It has a "plain" USB 2 host/client port, but it seems that the PHY is rubbish and doesn't work, so they've stopped fitting the connector. Rev C (Nov 2008) will use a different phy and will work.

It does (as Mark pointed out) have USB OTG which will work as either host or client at super high speed.

The processor itself has a TI DSP integrated into it as well as a POWERVR graphics engine, in one word, ridiculous!

Hopefully ours will turn up sometime this week and I'll be able to have a play!

The current "user submitted projects" on their website are, well, quite frankly crap. Maybe there's scope here for something....

The Cortex parts are Thumb-2 instruction set only, no mixed mode like the ARM7 parts (this is where ARM gets confusing with their processor and architecture families having similar naming conventions).

Edit:



So it seems that Thumb-2 implements the complete 32 bit instruction set, so maybe the binary would be compatible.

I have a fairly powerful EQ lying dormant in the only place I ever listen to my empegs, so I am definitely game to try this.

Edit: Well, I just ordered one.

Does look quite cool to play with. I might just have to buy one myself. The video demo on Youtube was pretty impressive for such a little device.

I would have liked to see ethernet and one or two other things but that goes against the whole concept of the thing which was basically getting a chip on a board.

Might wait for November though for Rev C

These look good too. Lots of ports to play with and a touchscreen for $200! ARM7 processor.

Dunno. Have to be careful once these things start going past $200 because you might as well buy an Eee PC by that point and rip it apart...

As you said though, it's an ARM7 and offers nowhere near the performance of the beagleboard and no MMU==no Linux.

Our beagleboard arrived this morning, I've had it playing the bigbuckbunny 720p trailer with few framedrops - this board is seriously impressive.

Unfortunately, sound doesn't work in the current angstrom distro - to the point that it causes kernel panics.

Fits our requirements perfectly though