{"id":1639,"date":"2009-04-02T11:28:41","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T18:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mightyohm.com\/blog\/?p=1639"},"modified":"2022-12-28T12:50:56","modified_gmt":"2022-12-28T20:50:56","slug":"esc-beagle-board-class-wrapup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mightyohm.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/esc-beagle-board-class-wrapup\/","title":{"rendered":"ESC Beagle Board Class Wrapup"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I attended the Build Your Own Embedded System (BYOES)<\/a> classes at ESC 2009<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The BYOES classes<\/a> were primarily focused on the Beagle Board<\/a>, an ARM Cortex-A8 based single board computer<\/a> developed by engineers at Texas Instruments.<\/p>\n

When I picked up my conference registration on-site, I also received a Beagle Board dev kit which included a 2GB SD card, a Class 1 Bluetooth USB adapter, and a tiny box containing a brand new Rev C2 Beagle Board.\u00a0 This was pretty exciting, given that the C2 boards haven’t even hit Digikey yet, making me one of a select group to have a C2 board!<\/p>\n

Here’s a photo of the kit as provided by ESC.<\/p>\n

\"Rev<\/p>\n

The classroom was full of LCD monitors, keyboards, mice, and USB hubs – but no computers.\u00a0 This is where the Beagle Board comes in.<\/p>\n

\"ESC<\/p>\n

The first step was to plug the peripherals into the board, as shown below.\u00a0 The HDMI interface for the LCD is at the upper right of the board, while the SD card and USB host port is on the left.\u00a0 The bottom of the board has a DC power jack and the USB OTG port which we used later.\u00a0 The whole board is actually powered via USB – the other end of the cable with the DC plug goes into the USB hub, and the hub powers everything.\u00a0 Pretty cool.<\/p>\n

\"Rev<\/p>\n

The classes<\/a> were fantastic.\u00a0 I saw lots of really impressive demos, including some really neat 3D graphics using the onboard OMAP35x SGX 2D\/3D graphics accelerator.<\/p>\n

I particularly enjoyed the Monday morning class, led by Beagle Board designers Jason Kridner and Gerald Coley.\u00a0 Jason gave an overview of both the impressive feature list of the board and the large development community behind beagleboard.org<\/a>.\u00a0 Gerald talked about the hardware development process, including some of the difficulties with the OMAP3 processor, which uses PoP<\/a> technology.\u00a0 The system memory chip is soldered to pads on top of the CPU, which is then soldered to the PCB.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, this process took some optimization to get right.<\/p>\n

Some observations:<\/p>\n