Out in the Northeast Texas town of Ft. Worth, a company called
CircuitCo started making something they called the
BeagleBoard -- an
open source hardware single-board computer for educators and experimenters. Now, with help and support from Intel, they're making and supporting the Atom-based
MinnowBoard, which is also open source, and comes with
Angstrom Linux to help experimenters get started with it. David Anders is the Senior Embedded Systems Engineer at CircuitCo. Slashdot's
Timothy Lord met David at
LinuxCon North America 2013 in New Orleans and made this video of him talking about the recently-released
MinnowBoard and the more mature BeagleBoard.
Bay Trail-M NUC for LESS
By frooddude
•
2013-Sep-26 15:32
• Score: 3
• Thread
http://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Bay-Trail-M-Powered-Intel-NUC-Coming-Q1-2014-140
You have to wait, but compared to this it's worth it.
Not Fort Worth
By metallurge
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2013-Sep-26 15:35
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
Richardson, a city of about 100,000 people where CircuitCo is located, is part of exurban Dallas, not exurban Fort Worth. The summary is incorrect.
Too Pricey
By GeorgeHahn
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2013-Sep-26 15:56
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
Too expensive to matter. It isn't just uncompetitive, it's priced completely out of it's market.
Too much for so little
By LoRdTAW
•
2013-Sep-26 17:49
• Score: 3
• Thread
What I would rather see in an embedded Linux board is more I/O. I am not talking about USB, HDMI or Ethernet but honest to goodness digital I/O's and serial busses like I2C or SPI. The minnowboard has a measly 8 GPIO's and two more hardwired to LED's. That isn't worth $200 when I can get the same thing by purchasing a cheap Atom ITX board and then adding an FPGA PCI I/O card from Mesa Electronics for slightly more.
If you want to impress me and make it worth $200 then how about using the Intel Atom Processor E6x5C featuring an embedded Altera FPGA which is connected to the CPU by a friggen PCIe Gen2 x1 link. Then include a default bitfile for the FPGA which gives you a bunch of GPIO, PWM and UARTS for serial ports like RS232, SPI and I2C. Also breakout the remaining PCIe link for further expansion. A kernel driver will then expose the various I/O devices inside the FPGA to a standard API. Then port the Wiring libs which is used by the Arduino to the new API for the FPGA and you will now have a development board that will blow the competition away. Even the Arduino IDE can be modified to build Linux binaries for the new API. Bonus points of you throw a nice 8 channel 16 bit high speed ADC on there. No re-learning new libraries or languages. Arduino libs could be added without code modification provided they don't make low level calls. Even then simple modifications could be made to port them. The API could also be called from any other language like C++, Go, Ada, D or whatever you fancy so you can write code in your language of choice. Newbies could plug in the board wait for it to boot and configure the FPGA and start writing code and wiring it into their projects, they already know Arduino libs so let them use those. If you really want to be fancy use the RT PREEMPT patch and let more advanced users write code for real time stuff guaranteeing determinism.
Imagine then if the internal FPGA bits could then be added to or modified to include new I/O devices. Establish a standard bus and I/O address space for the FPGA and make a template for writing new modules. Write a GUI editor which lets you snap modules onto the bus like Legos and set the address space and their I/O pins. Call Quartus using scripts in the background and generate the new bitfile which can be uploaded on the fly to the FPGA from the host OS. Then the standard API for the kernel driver would simplify writing libraries for talking to the new modules. Want to make a CNC? Add quadrature encoder interfaces and H bridge controllers and directly drive servo motors. Software radio, DSP, video processing, audio processing, the possibilities are endless. Then the community can release HDL modules which the user can snap into their designs and then do the wiring. This way people don't have to learn complex HDL programming, they use what the community provides. Don't like the default bitfile layout or standard templates? Write your own HDL code and do what you please. Open hardware means you have all the specs and source.
If that were available for 200-300 then I would gleefully say shut up and take my money.
Northeast Texas?
By Virtucon
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2013-Sep-26 18:46
• Score: 3
• Thread
Folks around here say North Texas. Northeast Texas would be Texarkana.
Either that or North Central Texas would have sufficed.
Getting back to the Minnow board, it's a little pricey but I'm sure third parties will start embracing it like the hardware vendors around Raspberry PI.