Open Source Bites Board

Sept. 11, 2008

Texas Instruments’ $149 Beagle Board can be purchased from DigiKey’s Web site. It contains a dual-core OMAPOMAPOMAPOMAP3 platform with a 600-MHMHz Cortex-A8 and C64+ DSP processor with video accelerator. The chip also has hardware support for Open GL E

William G. Wong

Texas Instruments’ $149 Beagle Board can be purchased from DigiKey’s Web site. It contains a dual-core OMAP3 platform with a 600-MHMHz Cortex-A8 and C64+ DSP processor with video accelerator. The chip also has hardware support for Open GL ES 2.0 that can render up to 10 Mpolygons/s. The 430-MHMHz C64+ can handle HD video. Linux and Windows CE are available for the Cortex-A8, while DSP-BIOIOS and codecs run on the C64+. Open-source codecs are in the works. For now, some closed-source codecs are available for free. Programming is possible via JTAG or USB. An SD/MMC slot provides storage expansion. Some but not all of the peripheral ports are available for interfacing. The board also has 128 Mbytes of LPLPDDR memory and 256 Mbytes of NAND flash.

BeagLe Board • www.beagleboard.org
DigiKey • www.digikey.com
Texas Instrumentsts • www.ti.com

See associated figure

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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