TI Beagle Board aimed at Indian developers

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TI Beagle Board aimed at Indian innovators

Beagle board is an ultra low cost, high performance, low power embedded platform based on TI's OMAP3530

Pradeep Chakraborty

Saturday, October 18, 2008

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BANGALORE, INDIA: Texas Instruments recently introduced the pocket-size, USB-powered Beagle Board based on TI's OMAP3530 applications processor, which features an ARM Cortex-A8 core, 2D/3D graphics engine and high-performance TMS320C64x+TM digital signal processor (DSP) core. This will help open source developers and hobbyists in India to realize their creative design ideas without being restricted by expensive hardware development tools, lackluster performance capabilities, high power consumption or stifled design environments.

Excerpts from an interview with Khasim Syed Mohammed, Lead Developer for Open Platforms, Texas Instruments India Pvt. Ltd.

CIOL: What is Beagle Board and what can it do?
Khasim Syed Mohammed: Beagle board is an ultra low cost, high performance, low power embedded platform based on Texas Instruments' OMAP3530 technology. It helps us in learning cutting edge technology, innovating new ideas and executing them. Beagle board should be used to explore the growing demand in areas like medical, security, infotainment, navigation, education, signal processing, mobile devices and communication.

This initiative is particularly important in India where students can use the board to learn, show case their efforts and global recognition for their innovations. Innovators in India should use this opportunity to prototype their ideas using the specification software hardware openly available in a never before package. It is important for the student community to learn new technologies, explore new areas and innovate. This initiative by TI also helps startups in India who want to explore the OMAP hardware but have limited support base for their requirements.

Passionate open source developers and hobbyists in India can realize their creative design ideas without being restricted by expensive hardware development tools, lackluster performance capabilities, high power consumption or stifled design environments. Open platform innovators have the expandability of desktop machines without the expense, bulk or noise with the Beagle board, which is a powerful, low-cost and fan-less embedded system development board smaller than the size of an index card.

The board is named after a popular breed of dogs, Beagle. It has been designed it to be one of the shortest pocket sized OMAP3530 boards. We are encouraging the Open community to treat this as a pet which is easy to carry and can be USB powered so that development is made easy and can perform high end applications at very less power.

Inspired to create a small, open source development board, a small group of enthusiastic engineers worked together on the concept and realization of the Beagle board. The resulting three inch by three inch board bridges desktop and embedded development by allowing developers to use the same peripherals and usage mode for almost limitless expansion. Developers are able to design exactly according to their specifications and collaborate with the community on creative new applications.

There is a growing need for development support in the Open Community. The Open Community is capable and passionate to work on industry's high end processors and architectures and build innovative applications and prototypes for mobile, portable infotainment, portable navigation, medical, home security and many such applications. Another important reason for this initiative was the cost implications in owning a high end platform which was restricting them in exploring many such ideas/applications.

The Beagleboard.org is a global initiative to address the growing needs of the Open community to help them innovate and explore new areas by providing them access to leading hardware and software, giving them a forum to present their views and thoughts, showcasing their efforts for global appreciation, maintain community's contribution.

Developers can quickly maximize their design concepts by tapping into the expertise and support of some of the industry's top Linux programmers already experimenting with the Beagle board. With communities hosting the latest updates and codes, live forums and chats for easy collaboration, developers have easy access to support and exchange of ideas. Users are encouraged to join active, existing communities already participating in the project.

CIOL: What are the salient features of this initiative?
KSM: The Beagle board is based on Texas Instruments' (TI) OMAP3530 applications processor which features an ARM CortexTM-A8 core, 2D/3D graphics engine and high-performance TMS320C64x+TM digital signal processor (DSP) core.

The Beagle board gives the open source community access to the industry's highest performance ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) broadly available today, the OMAP3530 processor, which integrates a 600 MHz superscalar ARM Cortex-A8 core that utilizes highly accurate branch prediction and multiple instruction pipelines.

As the superset device of TI's OMAP35x platform, the OMAP3530 device provides more than 1200 Dhrystone millions of instructions per second (MIPS) to run a full Linux operating systems with desktop window managers and office applications, and also integrates an OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible graphics engine to achieve photo-realistic, real-time pixel-shaded graphics for gaming and 3D user interface acceleration. A 430 MHz C64x+ DSP core is capable of handling high-definition (HD) video (MPEG-4 decode at 720p) for embedded applications, such as home media centers, robotics, Web kiosks and digital signage.

The need for technology is growing exponentially in segments like medical, automotive, communication and in our daily lives as well. The trend is to make technology available as well as applicable, and then make it accessible at a lowest possible cost. We are innovating on a concept, executing it to become a product and optimize the cost to reach all sections. In future more focus will be on solving global issues. The products will be defined more broadly that address the needs of the global market than based on specific countries. There is a huge convergence of technology towards the mobile market.

Technology should be mobile and portable, there by increasing the need for low power or no power based devices. Semiconductor industry is faced with a challenge to produce processors and architecture to meet the performance required by high end applications. The software industry will find it difficult to re-use the code base as the underlying hardware drastically changes on every spin. Also, the consumer base is acquiring intelligence of underneath hardware and design which will push OEMs to produce low cost, single unit- multi domain solutions. The trend is also towards creating open platforms from the desk of consumer.

CIOL: How can the open source community benefit?
KSM: Beagle board is targeted towards the Open Community developers, enthusiasts and hobbyists who want to explore high end application processors for quick prototyping of ideas and thoughts. It is also meant for the academia to learn and explore industry's best ARM architecture, 3D graphics, C64x + DSP.

It is extremely useful for one who would like to execute open standards like Open Max, Open GL, Open CV, gStreamer, Direct FB, and many such application frameworks. Other Embedded OS developers/enablers like WinCE, Symbian, Google Android, etc. can also benefit from this platform. It is free from licensing formalities and hence, there is no restriction for any one using this platform to explore other OSes.

Developers can utilize the standard expansion buses to add their own peripherals they already own via standard expansion buses, such as a high-speed USB 2.0, MMC/SD/SDIO and DVI-D. In addition to utilizing the DVI-D port to add a digital monitor, an S-Video port can be used to add a TV or the USB miniAB connector can be used to add a high-speed hub for a keyboard, mouse, WiFi or Ethernet connection and web camera. The MMC/SD connector can be used to add multiple gigabytes of storage or SDIO-based WiFi and Bluetooth functionalities.

The TI Beagle board allows developers to take their projects with them on the go as they no longer need to worry about a large power supply as there are several ways to power the board through the USB connector. For instance, the board can be connected to a laptop, a car adaptor to run off the car power, a battery-based cell phone charger or a solar-powered backpack.

The industry's leading C64x+ DSP, it includes more advantages such as video acceleration, 128MB DDR, 256MB NAND, High Speed USB 2.0 OTG, S-Video (TV out), DVI-D, Stereo Audio Out & In, 8-bit SD/MMC, JTAG, UART, Expansion connector to provide extended connectivity with standard connections like I2C, MMC, SPI and GPIO.

The Beagle board is a generic board with OMAP3530 (ARM Cortex A8 + DSP + SGX). The first of its kind, it is a highly active community and a community portal where developers discuss issues and present thoughts. Before the Beagle board was initiated, OMAP technology was accessible to a few who were under an NDA and who could buy the product. Today, it is open to all. The application developers were simulating mobile applications on PCs and few embedded systems that were pretty old. With this initiative they will be able to access to the actual latest hardware.

CIOL: How can Beagle Board enhance product development?
KSM: Beagleboard.org is a collaborative portal for a community of developers seeking to utilize, share experiences on and innovate with OMAP3. The objectives of this collaborative effort are to facilitate the open source community by aggregating blogs and other important information for users and provide community interaction for collaborative innovation. This is a platform "Of, By and For" community members.

The Beagle board community promotes community member activities and is a broad OMAP3530 collaboration portal. It focuses project developments "upstream" by establishing long-term presence and solving the broadest set of problems. It also aims to aggregate relevant project news "downstream" by informing OMAP3530 users of the broader open source world and avoiding a deluge of irrelevant information.

There are some key benefits of Beagleboard.org specifically to India:

Education: This will bring in awareness of the high end processors and chipsets in open community. It will give the academia a forum to learn and get an understanding of industry's leading architectures.
Innovation: Monetary constraints are an important factor restraining innovation. This will enable innovation at a very low funding to start with. It will also enable the Open Community to come up with open standards and software for next gen applications in the areas like vision, medical and low power.
Appreciation: Beagle Board will have the potential to draw global attention and thereby global appreciation. It might even enable new job opportunities for open community.

CIOL: How can it manage low power design issues?
KSM: The Beagle board is a generic multi core platform with high processing power. While ARM runs at 600 MHz, DSP can run at 430 MHz and SGX can run at 111 MHz thereby giving total system power at 1.2 GHz.

CIOL: What are the applications that the board can be used for?

KSM: This board could be used for various applications including:
Web services, 3D gaming, 3D UI, Linux Kernel and Driver development, Boot loaders and firm ware, portable media and infotainment applications, UI framework, ARM NEON codec development, Codec plug-in for G-streamer, Executing open standards like Open GL, OpenMax, Open CV, etc., Web browsers, High-end signal processing with generic DSP, and OLPC applications like Sugar.

©CIOL Bureau

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Read Comments

saurabh said on 8/21/2009 12:23:39 PM:
where can i find this board? what is the price? & how can i use this board as my project?

to saurabh

Mohammed Ali said on 3/28/2009 7:12:10 AM:
Ya Its Help full for the open community to develop.can i know what can i do now which is still not implemented? What can Student do using in academic project

to Mohammed Ali

Ed said on 2/10/2009 1:34:56 AM:
Have you managed to get it?

to Ed

Sudhir Mathane said on 11/17/2008 5:10:52 PM:
How do I get this board in India? I tried with Digi-key but they have some export regulations. I would be grateful for any pointers. Sudhir (9742139297)

to Sudhir Mathane

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