在 2011-02-27日的 19:25 +0800,cheng chen写道:
参赛发板子?
On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 6:20 PM, Caius 'kaio' Chance <kaio@fedoraproject.org
wrote:
我買了一塊 xM,大家有沒有興趣搞這個?
免费发一块给我还差不多,XD…… 我都是在学校实验室搞的……
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jason Kridner jkridner@beagleboard.org Date: Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:22 PM Subject: [beagleboard] ANNOUNCEMENT: Annual State of the Beagle Report 2011 To: Beagle Board beagleboard@googlegroups.com
My apologies for the tardiness of this report. 2010 was the busiest year yet for BeagleBoard.org and the rest of 2011 looks to be even busier with more people learning and teaching about low-power open-source development with the BeagleBoard, more interesting derivative hardware designs and add-ons that improve what you can build with what you've learned, more software distributions supporting the BeagleBoard in their mainline offerings and overall improved experiences as the platform and community evolve.
Google Summer of Code
One of my highlights for 2010 was the BeagleBoard.org mentorship in the Google Summer of Code. We mentored 6 students to successfully complete projects ranging from ARM assembly optimizations within the XBMC media center project to building a USB packet sniffer you can use with your own hardware. There were also projects on optimizing OpenCV, simplifying use of the C6x DSP, performing pulse width modulation and providing an ARM-optimized FFT library. Each of the students was given $5,000 for their efforts by Google and have provided their source code that you can use in your own projects.
Hunyue, Vladimir, Mans and I all visited Google for the mentor summit and interacted with hundreds of developers helping to advance the state of open source. We learned that Google is planning to expand the program in 2011, so it is time to get started, so please help update the idea page and register yourself as a prospective mentor if you'd like to participate.
For more information, visit http://beagleboard.org/gsoc.
TI/UT BeagleBoard Design Challenge
Texas Instruments challenged students at the University of Texas to provide an open source design and present it for the world to vote upon. Several interesting designs were created, including one picked up by PopSci.com. For more information, visit http://www.ti.com/beagleboardchallenge.
Projects
The sponsored projects program died off last year as very few updates were being provided by the registered projects. Lots of open source software and cool hardware projects continued to be developed with around 1,000 BeagleBoard-related blog posts in 2010 (a bit over 2,500 all-time by my count) that ended up in the BeagleBoard.org RSS feed, but the board giveaways had very little to do with it. If you are someone who is very interested in that program or you have an update regarding your project, there are still giveaways from Gumstix, Always Innovating, Archos and others (including BeagleBoards) if you can show that you've had some interesting progress and want to try putting your code on one of those platforms. If you give good feedback we can update http://beagleboard.org/contest to reflect that feedback and relaunch the program.
While significant progress has come from projects like Linaro, Ubuntu, MeeGo and now Yocto providing direct support for the BeagleBoard, I think the real progress in improving the project output will be in improving the http://beagleboard.org/project page to include a database of project build, functionality and test updates. The idea is to create scripts that can be included with project build and test scripts to utilize OAuth to provide database entries that can be browsed quickly to show project activity without ever needing to visit the site. Contact me on IRC for more details if you'd like to contribute. Project source will be part of the website source tree. This will also be something I'll be talking about as part of BeagleCast, something I'll be discussing at the bottom of this report.
xM Launch, Availability and Pricing
The big story for 2010 was the launch of the BeagleBoard-xM, which brought the BeagleBoard to 1GHz and 512MB RAM, as well as adding additional USB host ports and Ethernet. The revision has been well received and distributors have had trouble keeping stock on both this revision as well as the pre-xM boards. Digi-Key has been getting hundreds of boards a week of both revisions and the typical wait on back-orders has been under 2 weeks, but every time distributors start to show stock additional orders have come in. The moral of the story is don't wait for the distributors to show stock if you want to get a board--just place your order and you'll get a board pretty quick. CircuitCo is working on increasing its capacity and with large back-orders from distributors being placed ahead of orders from end customers, we expect the situation not to get worse than a few weeks wait and by mid-year to actually have some inventory. Even TI has started placing some orders to try to build up some inventory of xM boards.
Gerald had initially built in some pad for purchasing 1GB RAMs after the initial switch-over costs were covered, but we felt a price drop was more in order, enabling us to drop the price of the xM boards enough for some distributors to provide them for as low as $149--the price of the pre-xM board. Improvements in test yields and increased volume purchases also enabled Gerald and CircuitCo to lower the price of the pre-xM board allowing it to be sold at some distributors for just $125. We aren't yet to $99, but I am starting to feel like we could get there at some point in the future.
We are still discouraging anyone using the board in production devices without making a direct isolated deal with CircuitCo (or the manufacturer of your choice) such that all our supply doesn't get eaten up for new people getting the platform. (Guys, make your own spin, the TI component pricing is on the web and it can be done at a reasonable cost around the same price for which we are selling the boards today if you can get a fair price on the memories.) Availability of production volume SOM/COMs using the TI DaVinci/Sitara/OMAP devices that are providing migration support from the BeagleBoard are increasing, including AM35x-based boards available for as little as $45 and tiny boards that include WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and more. Open source hardware reference designs like the AM3517 CraneBoard are meant to further enable such developments. Please support the growth of the BeagleBoard.org and embedded Linux ecosystem by evaluating those solutions and encouraging these vendors to support the mainline distribution projects. Please help me update the http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/OMAP3_Boards wiki page to include these BeagleBoard alternatives and feel free to discuss them on this mailing list, though you likely need to contact the manufacturer to discover the proper support forum if you are having issues related to the hardware or software they provide.
What is next?
Gerald has some minor modifications planned to the pre-xM and xM boards to bring in the latest revision of power management device, but that should not result in any software impact. Where you are more likely to see differences out-of-the-box on some future board revision this year is in the software distributed on the board. We are encouraging CircuitCo to pull down a more complete copy of the Angstrom Distribution aligned completely with what is being assembled with Narcissus to ship with the boards to better show the functionality. This will in no way prevent you from running Android (as from the Rowboat project), Ubuntu, Yocto, MeeGo, FreeBSD, QNX, Windows Embedded or any other software on your BeagleBoard. If you care about what this software will look like, please review the release candidate images Koen has been posting links on the mailing list and provide feedback.
Part of what is motivating an in-the-box distribution release is the need to provide students being educated using the BeagleBoard platform a known starting point that helps them reach success early. The requirements for this effort are being discussed in the BeagleBoard Linux Education Project and seek to improve the materials Mark Yoder has been creating for his university course on embedded Linux. If you care to get involved with this project, introductory details can be found at http://beagleboard.org/linux_education. Be on the lookout for a Google Summer of Code project targeting these requirements.
While not a BeagleBoard.org project, 2010 saw the launch of the PandaBoard focused on enabling open source mobile application framework developers access to the latest in mobile applications processors. This has spawned a lot of interest if there would be an OMAP4 or multicore-A9 based BeagleBoard. At this point it isn't clear, but if TI were to provide access to OMAP4 to the broad market (through TI distributors without any volume restrictions), then it would make sense to upgrade the BeagleBoard platform once the end-user experience can be ensured to meet or exceed the experience on the current pre-xM and xM platforms. I can tell you it isn't eminent and that the release process would include the typical discussion of features here on the mailing list before anything was frozen, sampling of boards to active community members (which always results in pictures up on Flickr and discussion on the IRC channel) and a public launch plan. There is certainly a chance that the BeagleBoard won't get updated until Cortex-A15 devices come out, but be assured the BeagleBoard.org effort is focused on longevity and education.
In my mind, the BeagleBoard is the premier platform for embedded open source *software* hacking and education thanks to it being extremely low-power, small and capable of running full Linux distributions while having a rich hardware ecosystem. If you are looking for something a bit more modular, in a case, with a battery, it seems to me something like the Bug Labs platform might be the way to go. We even worked on a BeagleBoard-BugAdapter, but never brought it to market as I got my hands on a Bug2.0 and it is more fun just to play with it. Still, hardware hackers cannot be deterred and there are now several registered companion boards [1] starting with our friends over at TinCanTools. While the Zippy combo boards that add Ethernet aren't that popular now that the xM boards incorporated Ethernet on them, their Trainer board might see a bit more life as it is getting picked up for some educational projects on performing I2C and SPI interactions under Linux. The Liquidware BeagleTouch and BeagleJuice add-ons also seem to be enjoying some public success. Some SOM/COM vendors are finding the BeagleBoardPinMux EEPROM ID useful for maintaining a high degree of binary software compatibility with the BeagleBoard. I think the news is that CircuitCo, as part of its BeagleBoardToys brand, is looking to partner with more individuals and small entities looking to bring out more BeagleBoard extending hardware and that might mean a few more options to extend your BeagleBoard hardware in 2011.
[1] http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardPinMux#Vendor_and_Device_IDs
Open Source Shows and the BeagleWall
I won't even attempt to list all of the open source shows where the BeagleBoard had a presence in 2010 or will have a presence in 2011, but I highly encourage you to get on the mailing list and announce if you are interested in showing off anything you've done at one of the regional shows around the world. My favorite of these show-off demos recently *has* to be the BeagleWall. Originally assembled by folks in the FFmpeg project (notably Mans) and friends over at Archos (Vladimir, the infamous av500), Koen got the TI team in Europe to put together a stand that looks a bit more official (boards aren't lying around on a nearby radiator any more). You can find plenty of pictures of the BeagleWall at FOSDEM 2011 by searching on Flickr and YouTube.
Given the sheer number of events, I'm trying to get a bit more organized by placing them in the BeagleBoard.org Google Calender that is now featured on the home page of BeagleBoard.org. I request for you to notify me of any events that you don't see up there and to suggest we discuss the upcoming event on BeagleCast...
BeagleCast
What the heck is BeagleCast? Well, you can probably tell from the name that Gerald and I are looking to hork in on (meaning to steal) the action of the likes of TWiT (This Week in Tech) and The Amp Hour by doing an audio webcast. This will never get done unless we publicly commit to it, like we are doing right here, right now. Give us a month or so to get the first one out, but this will give us a forum for discussing the challenges being faced by community developers, upcoming open source tradeshows, technology related to high-performance, low-power open source software and hardware and why 26 + 26 = 54. It will also force me to dedicate a set time for tackling the top questions on the mailing list and IRC channel.
Of course, this won't take off without getting participation from the community and getting some good guests to talk about the cooler aspects of embedded Linux and DIY computing, so I strongly request for you to submit ideas on guest/permanent hosts, topics, format, etc. You can even call-in with pre-recorded questions. If you couldn't tell from visiting #beagle in the past, heavy doses of sarcasm are encouraged.
Here's where to provide the inputs and call-ins: http://bit.ly/bcsuggest +1 (713) 234-0535 http://beagleboard.blogspot.com may have a Google Voice widget, depending on your Flash settings and if the current sun flare activity.
That's it! See you on the intertubes!
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-- Regards ☺ Caius 'kaio' Chance Fedora Project Contributor - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Kaio [IRC] kaio @ freenode | [Twitter] @K410 | [Blog] kaio.net _______________________________________________ Chinese mailing list Chinese at lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/chinese