We recently announced an expansion board which carries a Openmoko LCD
module (2.8inch VGA touchscreen) so that it can be connected to a
Beagle Board. The idea is to provide it as a platform (evaluation/demo
system) to support early community software development for a
potentially upcoming new open hardware smartphone, i.e. some mixture
(hybrid) of the Beagle Board and the Openmoko Freerunner projects.
Now, we have ready a second revision of our board that solves problems
identified in the first one. And, we have added a Sirf III GPS
receiver and a ITG-3200 Gyroscope so that the unit can be used to
study navigation systems. If you search through our pictures and
videos, it will show a battery operated portable beagleboard running
tangoGPS.
Since we originally come from the Openmoko community, most information
is already collected and referenced there:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/index.php?title=Openmoko_Beagle_Hybrid
Please also see the announcement on the Openmoko community mailing
list which has a lot of links to further information:
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2010-July/062609.html
Please note that this board is not compatible with other Beagle Board
extensions (like Zippy etc.). The reaso is that we need to solder the
expansion headers differently and there is no EEPROM on the board for
automatic detection. To support our peripherals, we have our own U-
Boot, kernel and Debian-rootfs demo image. U-Boot and kernel are based
on the Beagle Board validation git and we try to track changes.
Another note: since we do not have a BeagleBoard XM yet, we don't know
if it is compatible, but it is very likely.
At this stage I would like to say a big, big THANK YOU to the Beagle
Board team since their basic work has been the key enabler to move our
project to the current stage (and - let's cross fingers - beyond).
Nikolaus