BeagleBone report #1

[Dave Curtis]

FYI to the group: I have a BeagleBone that I have started playing with a little bit. So far I'm pretty impressed -- very easy to get started. If there are questions I'll do my best to answer, but I'm still climbing the learning curve.

Here is a report I sent to someone else that asked about it:

Great out-of-box experience.

* Ships with uSD card with very complete Angstrom Linux distro. Lots of packages pre-installed. (Compare to BeagleBoard -- buy an SD card, research an image, figure out how to write it on an SD card, pray....)

* In addition to a standard Beagle/Panda power connector, it can run from USB power. (Compare to BeagleBoard -- buy/construct power supply).

* Built in wired ethernet. (Compare to BeagleBoard, scrounge up a dongle and pray the drivers for it are in your kernel.)

What you do: Take Bone and USB cable out of box, plug it into a spare USB port, it appears as a USB drive on your desktop. Open documentation on SD card with a web browser. Download USB serial and debug drivers from SD card and install. Open terminal program on the new USB serial device -- userid: root, no password. Proceed to hack.

I had compiled and run "Hello, World!" in C and also in Python (2.7.x is preinstalled) within a few minutes of powering it up.

Software documentation is still very sketchy (it's very new). So I poked around and was able to blink the user LEDs. Now it's a matter of digging -- beyond what I've done there isn't a lot of BeagleBone specific software documentation. (The hardware documentation is very good.) So I'm currently getting ready to dig into the Linux source tree to read up on the gpio driver code -- so I guess you could say that the level of s/w documentation is: you can go read the comments in the Linux source tree and figure out what that means to you :)

As a robot controller I think it will be great. The I/O is all 3.3 volts, instead of the pesky 1.8 volts that the BeagleBoard and PandaBoard have, which means with the Bone you don't need level converters for most things. It is very compact, in part because they left off all the video cruft that you don't need in a robot anyway. The physical connector for getting to the I/O is very convenient.

-dave

[wally_666]

I looked at the Beaglebone as a way of getting rid of the high latency periods servicing my SPI device on the Pandaboard, while there were fewer of them and they generally were shorter >3ms instead of >5mS it didn't solve my problem.

I'm here because it seems getting a real-time kernel running on the Pandaboard is further along than doing so on the Beaglebone.

This seems to be the best I could find about the current state of affairs for the Bone and RT:

http://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone?focusedCommentId=8487254#comment-8487254

Looks to me its pretty hopeless at the moment until the 3.6 port to the Beaglebone is complete.

But if you don't need any video display the Beaglebone is a pretty sweet form factor and layout.