BeagleBoard

BeagleBoard

The USB-powered BeagleBoard is a low-cost, fan-less single board computer that unleashes laptop-like performance and expandability without the bulk, expense, or noise of typical desktop machines.

OMAP3530 processor highlights:

  • Over 1,200 Dhrystone MIPS using the superscalar ARM Cortex-A8 with highly accurate branch prediction and 256KB L2 cache running at up to 600MHz
  • 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

Expansion capability and power options to satisfy your imagination:

  • DVI-D for connecting digital computer monitors
  • Compatibility with a huge collection of USB peripherals including hubs, keyboards, mice, WiFi, Bluetooth, web cameras, and much more
  • MMC+/SD/SDIO interface for memory or wireless connectivity
  • S-Video out for connecting your NTSC or PAL television or wearable visor
  • Stereo audio in and out for a microphone and headphones or speakers
  • Power via typical USB chargers for cell phones from your laptop, from an automobile adapter, from batteries, or even from a solar backpack

SD Card Creation

  1. At a minimum, you need to create the first partition on an SD card to store the bootloader files and kernel uImage. For the root filesystem you can choose to use either a second partition on the SD card or a USB drive.
  2. The first partition should be FAT16 LBA (partition type 0E), and a size of 128MB is plenty of space for the needed files.
    Format the partition with mkfs.vfat, for example: mkfs.vfat -F 16 -n "bootloader" /dev/mmcblk0p1
  3. If you plan to use the SD card for the root filesystem as well, create a second partition of type Linux filling the rest of the free space, preferably at least 1-2GB.
    Format the partition with mkfs.ext3, for example: mkfs.ext3 -L "rootfs" /dev/mmcblk0p2
  4. If you plan to use a USB drive for the root filesystem, create a first partition on the drive of type Linux using at least 1-2GB.
    Format the partition with mkfs.ext3, for example: mkfs.ext3 -L "rootfs" /dev/sdb1
  5. Download the BeagleBoard bootloader tarball and extract the files onto the first partition of the SD card. These files contain the bootloaders needed to load the kernel. The file MLO needs to be the first file put onto the FAT partition, and extracting the tarball as-is should do this for you. If you have problems getting to U-Boot, re-format and place the files manually.
  6. Download the root filesystem tarball and extract it (as root) to the ext3 partition on either the SD card or the USB drive. It is important to do this as root, as special files need to be created as part of the filesystem that can only be created by root.
  7. Copy /boot/uImage from the ext3 partition to the fat16 partition.
  8. Create a boot.scr file following the instructions below to boot into the system.

Creating a boot.scr

  1. Create a file called bootcmd, and place U-Boot commands in there like a script file. For example:
    setenv bootargs 'console=ttyO2,115200n8 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootfstype=ext3 rootwait' mmc init fatload mmc 0 0x80300000 uImage bootm 0x80300000 boot
  2. Use mkimage to create the boot.scr file. For example:
    mkimage -A arm -O linux -T script -C none -a 0 -e 0 -n "Beagleboard boot script" -d bootcmd boot.scr
  3. Copy the resulting boot.scr to the fat16 partition on the SD card.

Architecture

ARMv7l Cortex-A8

Processor

TI OMAP 3530 720MHz

RAM

256MB

NAND

256MB

SD

Full SD

USB

1

Ethernet

10/100