Hi,
Just reading the announcements of the AM623 and 625 and was wondering if there is likely to be a beaglebone based on one of these Socs?
Well, I’m a big fan of AM62x. My last task before leaving TI was working on the requirements for AM62x. Depending on what we can do to acquire all the parts around it, I think we might be interested in doing something somewhat inventive with it.
What would your top desires for such a board be?
I’d say a board similar to the Black would be great, with built in TI wifi. It looks like a capable SoC as well, maybe having a smaller pocketbeagle style SoM might be a good idea too? Something that can enable product designers to use the AM62x in a system, making the memory/EMMC/etc not as hard to route for a small production run system. Oh, and lots of serial I/O.
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I would say the most desirable would be kind of similar to pocket beagle board with maybe Dual/Quad FTDI onboard. At this moment PocketBeagle is awesome for robotics, but unfortunately, single CortexA8 is relatively weak. It would be nice to have multicore Cortex-A53 …
What do you think about how the headers would be populated? I’d lean to female headers on the bottom, but that wouldn’t be mikroBus compatible. Thoughts?
A backward-compatible header is probably the best idea so that a lot of simple capes will work out of the box. In the case of PocketBeagle shape, it would be nice to have 4-8 pads (just pads for 1mm vertical PCB Mount Header) or pads for JST-GH vertical connector, maybe some DIY robotics-related ones(like from dronecode???)
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To me, the Beagle series is all about the PRUs. If I can wrangle the PRUs into doing what I need, that generally wipes out an FPGA.
To me, being able to use the PRUs rather than an FPGA is huge. It makes my hardware design much simpler, and it means that general embedded programming folks can develop things.
If there is an FPGA involved, Verilog/VHDL along with a crappy toolchain gets involved and that encases the design in concrete.
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For ME (and the Christmas light community), the female headers on the bottom would definitely be preferred. That’s how all the capes using PocketBeagles are setup.
That said, the Pi4 Compute module style headers would definitely be acceptable if it would mean getting more of the functionality exposed to the capes. Having the ethernet, hdmi, etc… pins available could make it worth sacrificing compatibility, IMO. (as long as the am335x PocketBeagles will still be available)
The AM62x series looks impressive and I’d like to use it. Previously I was involved in a design project based upon the open-source information and community popularity of AM335x and it was a success. I’ve read a few posts on TI pleading for help and it puts me off using the AM62x - seems like it needs a bit more adoption - how about it Beagle?
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