Beagle Board
Got my Beagle Board up and running. I purchased a 5V, 1.2a, 2.1mm, center-positive power supply such as this one. I am also using an AT-Everex style serial port header such as this one.
There is a wealth of information available for those interested in booting something like Angstrom Linux on their board. It is much harder to find information for barebones programming on the Beagle Board.
You can start with the Technical Reference Manual from the TI OMAP3530 product page. However it is extremely dense and difficult to understand.
I managed to find some useful information on the web in this blog and also this stackoverflow answer.
I distilled these sources down into a small demo, available at github: Puppy, a barebones Beagle Board example.
You can get a software emulator for Beagle Board by compiling the version of QEMU found here: http://meego.gitorious.org/qemu-maemo
I recommend using ./configure --target-list=arm-softmmu
Then there will be a -M beagle option available. You will need to assemble a NAND flash image for the -mtdblock parameter. There are some guidelines on the Internet for how to do this. Note that most of them offer an out-of-date u-boot.bin file for you to download. If you want to use the same version that is flashed onto the Beagle Board, then you need to go to http://gitorious.org/beagleboard-validation. Or you can download the binary from the Puppy git repository, which also has scripts to create the NAND flash image.
Note, if you are using the Code Sourcery GCC for GNU/Linux, then you will need to modify the u-boot source code: http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2010-May/071363.html.
Categories: hacking
