Beagleboard - the future for ARM

I decided to dedicate my first test post on Habré to a very interesting piece of hardware, in my opinion, to the BeagleBoard single-board computer based on the OMAP3530 processor from Texas Instrumentals. A little about the characteristics of this "pebble":

** Over 1,200 Dhrystone MIPS using the ARM Cortex-A8 superscalar with 256KB L2 cache running at up to 600MHz
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** OpenGL © ES 2.0 capable 2D / 3D graphics accelerator capable of rendering 10 million polygons per second

** HD video capable TMS320C64x + DSP for versatile signal processing at up to 430MHz

** USB power via complete chip-set with minimal additional power-consuming logic



The characteristics of the board itself:



So, first things first :)

I ordered this overseas miracle via Digi-Key. Everything is as usual - payment Paypal and a friend "from the other bank" took and sent me the treasured box. It cost me a total of 155 evergreen units.
The contents of the package are a bit ascetic - soft packaging material and the board itself is antistatic. Since I got a revision without an onboard USB hub, and also because there was no built-in ethernet on it, I had to run to the nearest store, where the missing parts were bought:

* USB hub (300 rubles, nameless, with external power)
* USB-to-Lan adapter (800 rubles, TrendNet TU-ET100C, declared support for Linux-kernel-2.6.x)
* HDMI-DVI adapter (about 100 rubles, the HDMI connector is unsoldered on the board)
* SD-HC card for 4 GB (400 rubles, Kingston)

Further, small modifications were made to the board itself and the assembly of the whole pile of glands into one working system. First of all, I took care of the USB OTG / USB Host switch (there is a single 5-pin miniUSB connector on the board that can operate in both host mode and OTG mode). To do this, on a thin MGTFe, a micrick was soldered between 4 and 5 pins of the USB connector.
Then it was necessary to solve the issue of nutrition. The board is able to be powered both via miniUSB port (in OTG mode) and from an external 5v 350mA power supply. I didn’t want to power the miniUSB port at all, as well as use different power supplies for the USB hub and the board, so the following solution was invented. On the hub there was a weak DC-DC converter of the “horseradish-Chinese-krenka” type, which ideally could produce 5 volts 500mA. This did not seem to be enough to power the hub, the board, and other usb devices, so the converter was replaced with a “not-quite-shitty-Chinese-heel”, issuing (judging by the LD1086 # 50) as much as 5V 1.5A. These 5 volts from the hub were wound up (read - soldered) on the beagle (the connector of the power supply was previously removed from it).

(By the way, all these hardhacks are not required on Bigley revisions)

For the first launches, you also needed a “10-pin to DB9-male IDC Style” connector and a null modem cable (anu-ka, who remembers what it is?).

It remains only to connect the USB hub to the board, put the “host-OTG” switch in the “host” position, attach the USB-LAN adapter and energize the hub, which was immediately done. The lights flashed and the cherished letters appeared in the ttyS0 console:

Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.41
Starting OS Bootloader ...
U-Boot 1.3.3 (Jul 10 2008 - 16:33:09)
OMAP3530-GP rev 2, CPU-OPP2 L3-165MHz
OMAP3 Beagle Board + LPDDR / NAND
DRAM: 128 MB
NAND: 256 MiB
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial

That's all, pre-combat iron preparation and file fitting is over. You can proceed to the "virtual" part of the entertainment. Debian was chosen as the OS for the “crumb”, but more on that next time.

Wherefore I bow, Dropp.