[HH] Boston Linux Meeting BeagleBone Black and Open Source Computing

[Tom Metro]

> When:May 15, 2013 7PM (6:30PM for Q&A)
> Topic: BeagleBone Black and Open Source Computing
> Kurt Keville, Thaumaturgical Engineer, MIT Institute for Soldier
> Nanotechnologies - kkeville alum mit edu

I arrived a bit late, and missed most of Kurt's presentation. I gather
it was about a student built low-power cluster computer, and an update
on previously presented work in this area.


> Brian DeLacey, www.LinuxInTheLivingRoom.com, b delacey / gmail com
> 
> The BeagleBone Black was introduced on April 23rd at the DESIGN West
> conference. This next generation, credit-card-sized, open-everything
> microcomputer sells for $45 and offers broad, capable support for Linux
> Distributions and Android. This is a defining moment for Open Source
> Computing.

(My notes on the talk expanded from the IRC log. Some notes supplied by
JABR.)

Beagleboard.org is the primary site for more information on the
BeagleBoard line. It isn't officially operated by TI, the manufacturer
of the CPU on the BeagleBoards, but the site is ran by TI engineers.

Brian gave a brief history of the ARM CPU, and compared it to prior
revolutions in computing.

He then explained some of the history of the BeagleBoard product family,
and explained that they use a System on a Chip (SoC), rather than just a
CPU.

He demoed connecting a BeagleBone Black to a (Windows) PC and explained
how all programming now happens over a USB port (rather than a serial
JTAG connector, as on older models).

He illustrated the programming IDE, which runs in browser. The language
is variation on JavaScript.

Compared to a Raspberry Pi: BeagleBone Black is $10 more, faster, and
fully open (no binary blobs; all schematics and board layouts available).

Although it has no built-in real time clock. (No battery.) So you need
to use Network Time Protocol (NTP) or similar to set the time on startup.

(I think Kurt tossed out a suggestion that you can grab the time from
the wtmp file and use that as an approximate starting point until a more
accurate time can be retrieved. The idea being that wtmp would have its
timestamp updated at shutdown.)

The BeagleBone family has a smaller community than the Pi, but a few
books are being released on it. One from O'Reilly. And it has a great
reference manual from TI.

Someone asked if the BeagleBone Black has similar hardware bottlenecks
with Ethernet and USB the way the Pi does, but the answer wasn't known.

Someone asked if the Black's $45 price was in direct response to the
Pi's $35 price. Brian said that pre-orders for the Black from
distributors have been good, which allowed the manufacturer to reduce
costs through volume. [No doubt the Beagle designers saw how the market
reacted to the magic $35 price point, and that informed their component
selection for the Black.]

Brian passed around the room a 3D printed enclosure for the BeagleBone
Black that he designed. It was produced at isis3d
(http://www.isis3d.net/) and may eventually be offered for sale at
http://www.blumicro.com/, where you can see pictures of it.

Brian mentioned getting Google's JS derivative, Dart, working on the
BeagleBone Black.

Lastly Brian ported a a computer vision app (C++) (that he had developed
previously) to BeagleBone Black, and said it compiled and ran there
acceptably. (This might have been called "Coyote Cam", which was on the
slide, but he didn't mention why it was named that.)

Brian also requested meeting attendees to visit:
http://tinyurl.com/OCTOMom8
and place a no-obligation pre-order for an "Arndale Octa", a development
board for Samsung's Exynos 5410 SoC. If the manufacturer doesn't see
enough pre-orders, they may not produce the board.


> The May 15th meeting will take a hands-on, hacker-friendly look at the
> new BeagleBone Black. We'll step through board-level operations from
> boot-up to shutdown, from launching Linux to blinking LEDs.

I didn't stick around for the post-meeting hardware hands-on. Perhaps
someone who did can report of anything notable from that.

(I recommend following Federico's lead and using a macro camera to share
images of the working hardware on the video projector. A simple blinking
LED demo could be ran through that way.)


> Is BeagleBone Black a capable desktop or energy efficient server? Will
> you run ngstrm, Ubuntu, Android or something else?

Ubuntu and Android weren't mentioned that I recall. I assume that's
because the board comes with Ångström installed and Brian just hasn't
had the time to explore the other options. (For his intended
applications Android may not be all that useful.)


Thanks to Kurt and Brian for their presentations.


In this week's Adafruit "new products" video they mention that they have
the BeagleBone Black back in stock and 10% off, but checking a few hours
later, the product page:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1278

says it is out of stock again and shows the usual price.


element14, one of the other BeagleBone Black distributors, has a blog
post about it...specifically getting a camera peripheral working with it:
http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/dev_platforms_kits/element14_dev_kits/next-gen_beaglebone/blog/2013/05/15/beagle-bone-black-black-ops-no-not-the-game

  My mission: could I get the unsupported Camera Cape working despite no
  official support...and not all that much to work with?  Succinctly,
  YES!


 -Tom