PandaBoard

PandaBoard

PandaBoard is an OMAP4430 platform designed to provide access to as many of the powerful features of the OMAP4430 Multimedia Processor as possible, while maintaining a low cost. This will allow the user to develop software to utilize the features of the powerful OMAP4430 processor. In addition, by providing expandability via onboard connectors, the PandaBoard supports development of additional capabilities/functionality.

The PandaBoard ES is the latest revision containing a TI OMAP4460 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz. Both the original and ES versions are supported.

OMAP4430 Processor Highlights:

  • Dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ with Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) at 1 GHz each. Allows for 150% performance increase over previous ARM Cortex-A8 cores.
  • Full HD (1080p) multi-standard video encode/decode
  • Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR™ SGX540 graphics core supporting all major API's including OpenGL® ES v2.0, OpenGL ES v1.1, OpenVG v1.1 and EGL v1.3 and delivering 2x sustained performance compared to the previous SGX530 core
  • Low power audio

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. Use the xmkcard.sh script in the PandaBoard bootloader tarball to partition and format the SD card. This script will create and format two partitions: the first partition as FAT, the second as ext3. If the card shows up on your computer as /dev/sdX, run:
    ./xmkcard.sh /dev/sdX
    If it shows up as /dev/mmcblkX, run:
    ./xmkcard.sh /dev/mmcblkX
  3. 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
  4. Download the PandaBoard bootloader tarball and extract the files onto the first partition of the SD card. These files contain the U-Boot binary needed to load the kernel.
  5. Download the root filesystem tarball and extract it (as root, not with sudo) 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.
  6. Copy /boot/uImage from the ext3 partition to the FAT16 partition on the SD card.
  7. 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:
    fatload mmc 0 0x80300000 uImage setenv bootargs console=ttyO2,115200n8 noinitrd init=/sbin/init root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootwait rw loglevel=8 bootm 80300000
  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 "PandaBoard boot script" -d bootcmd boot.scr
  3. Copy the resulting boot.scr to the FAT16 partition on the SD card.

Architecture

ARMv7l Cortex-A9

Processor

TI OMAP 4430 1GHz Dual-core

RAM

1024MB

SD

Full SD

USB

2

Ethernet

10/100

Wireless

B/G/N, Bluetooth v2.1 + EDR