Netbook alternative?
Larry Howell
Saturday. One of Scott's demo robots was controlled by a Dell netbook,
and during the demo it was obvious he was very concerned about the robot
falling off the table which would probably damage the netbook. I has a
brief conversation with Scott and told him about a board I recently
acquired, a BeagleBoard-xM, that I think may be a better alternative
than a netbook. Scott suggested I post some details to the group.
Here's a link to the board: http://beagleboard.org/hardware-xM
The BeagleBoard-xM is an open source hardware project developed by a
group of TI engineers. This OMAP3 (Open Multimedia Applications
Platform) device includes an ARM Cortex-A8 MCU, TMS320C64 DSP, and
IVA2.2 (Image, Video, Audio) accelerator subsystems. An ARM v7 device
with Thumb2 instruction set can mix 16- and 32-bit instructions for
faster execution and 30% smaller code footprint. Check the link for
details on all the board's capabilities.
There's a very active GoogleGroup community that provides good support
for the hardware, as well as the various operating systems that are
available (Android, Angstrom, Ubuntu, Symbian, ONX, Win Embedded, WinCE,
Meego, RISC OS).
The BeagleBoard-xM is fully supported by the ARM version of Ubuntu, so
you can do anything on this board that you can do on your Ubuntu
netbook. I've installed Ubuntu 11.04 on an 8 GB micro-SD card. If I
connect a USB keyboard and mouse to the hub, and a LCD monitor to its
DVI-D output, the performance is similar to a netbook, so it provides a
comfortable environment.
This board costs about the same as a netbook if you include accessories,
but has a number of advantages in a robotic application. Here is a
quick list:
- Lower power requirements: The integrated USB 4-port hub with 100 Mbit
Ethernet can be turned off via software control, which reduces the draw
to about 1 A or about 25% of what the netbook requires.
- In addition to the 4 USB host ports, there's one USB device (OTG)
port, and there's also SPI and I2C serial via the I/O header.
- Since micro-SD cards are cheap (my 8 GB was $15), it's simple to have
several different ones. Once can be a stable version, while others can
be various development versions. This is harder to manage on a netbook
hard drive.
-The board is much smaller than a netbook and can easily be securely
mounted on a robot chassis With software stored in flash memory, it is
much more rugged than a netbook with a rotating hard drive.
- The DSP is capable of complex audio and video processing, and it's
operation has little impact on the Cortex-A8 MCU.
- The CPU includes NEON instructions for floating point calculations.
- Like many microcontrollers, the BB has a Harvard architecture with a
separate bud for data and another for program. This gives higher
performance at lower CPU clock speeds compared to the single bus of an
Atom netbook.
Larry
Scott Preston
I'd be happy to help.
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Cheers,
Scott