The ‘other’ BeagleBoard

I visited the Embedded World fair in Nürnberg on Wednesday this week together with some colleagues. Like always on events like this I stumble upon nice devices with Linux support… in fact embedded hardware like development platforms and devices for industrial use or consumer network stuff without running Linux seems to become uncommon. Just a few years back hackers had to search hard for useful devices or invest a lot of time reverse engineering consumer hardware. Unluckily cellphones are still problematic – even the linux ones are usually locked down so that they are not useful for developers.

But let’s stay with the ‘good’ ones: Karo Electronics showed a new low cost DIMM sized embedded module based on a 400MHz ARM9 CPU (The datasheet mentions Freescale, but lacks the name the chip.) A friend bought a similar one (a TX27) which came with full Linux kernel sources.

A real suprise was the booth of EBV: They build and sell their own BeagleBoard called EBVBeagle.

EBVBeagle (image source: EBV)

Its actually a BeagleBoard revision C2 with green PCB boxed with some useful accessories. It comes as a quite complete starter kit with AC adapter, USB to Ethernet adapter, MMC card, USB hub and some cables. The official press release can be found here. They claim (but not gurantee) to be able to deliver within two weeks. Looks like the only drawback is the minimum order value of 250 EUR which is – of course – more than the EBVBeagle kit.

Apropos Beagle Board – Maemo (which runs on the BeagleBoard too) has released some new bits. First  Maemo 5 alpha SDK is ready and released. This is pretty good for people using it on the Beagle Board because only the Maemo 5 SDKs support the OMAP3 SoC. For people who want to learn about Maemo development or development for Limux mobile devices in general there is a new Maemo Tutorial release. The Maemo Tutorial provides quite easy to understand and detailed information about Maemo platform and application development. It gives a lot of useful information about development for other Linux mobile device platforms as well.

Enjoy…