Information about Beagle project

Hi,

I've read about this project on http://beagleboard.org. It's a really
good project and I want to contribute to its development.
Although the main project's description is clear on beagle site, I
couldn't find project's details. So, I'll send some primary questions
:slight_smile:
What is the current stage? Beginning or more advanced?
Is there some documentation about the project's hw and sw? If yes,
which docs are available to developers?
How can I know when there will be alive chats, to participate?
And the main question, how can I get a project's task to contribute :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance,

David Cohen

David,

The stage is still very early. We are in the process of spinning our
second round of boards that we expect to give to just a handful of
developers to help us bootstrap the project. H/W and S/W
documentation should start to come on-line around the end of February.

Live chats can be found on BeagleBoard.org - chat and #beagle on
irc.freenode.net (they are linked to each other). The best way to get
a project task is to discuss that on the chat, to be sure that the
task is up-to-date.

Right now, I'm looking for people to review the website, primarily for
functionality, but also for content. It is actually live for public
edits right now. You can review the source on the gitweb. There is a
backlog of content needed mentioned on the Pibb discussion logs. Once
some more content is there, I'll be asking for translators to get
started. My current website task is adding multilanguage support.
The next step after that is started will be adding project registry
information.

A bit more background information on Beagle can be found at
BeagleBoard.org - brief. I still need to do a good vision write-
up some time, maybe this week.

-Jason

P.S. Thanks for sending this text back to me, since I mistakenly
replied only to you the first time.

Hello,

I recently became aware of the beagle board's existence through an
advisor at my college, who suggested it might be perfect for our
senior design project. We're looking for a board we can do image
processing and recognition for a robotic targeting system, but are
wondering on the stability and toolchains available for the board at
this time. Certain of the TI DSP boards can be targeted by MATLAB, is
this one of them? What toolchains are available for this board, if
any, at this early stage?

Thank you,
Mark Jacobson

Mark,

Great.

We don't yet have a release date as we are still doing board testing.
I'm expecting us to be ready for general orders before the summer, but
cannot make guarantees. We are able to make a handful of pre-release
boards available to those who are willing to help complete the board
testing, website development, initial projects useful to others, etc.
to help get the overall project off of the ground. Let me know if you
are a candidate for that, but it might not be suitable if your project
needs to be completed before the summer (unless your project itself is
to get Beagle going, perhaps with MATLAB).

The Beagle Board will certainly be capable of doing image processing
and recognition using the C64x+ DSP and the ARM Cortex-A8. The
toolchain is quite stable. You can download the Cortex-A8 gcc
toolchain from Code Sourcery (for free). ARM and TI also both sell
ARM Cortex-A8 toolchains (not for free). The C64x+ DSP toolchain is
available from TI (not for free), and a free version for non-
commercial use is being planned (x86 Linux binaries of compiler only).

I don't know about MATLAB support. I'll follow-up on that.

Regards,
Jason

There are no immediate plans for having BeagleBoard as a MATLAB target, but that could very well be a possibility as support for the board matures.

The Code Sourcery GCC tool chain (http://www.codesourcery.com/gnu_toolchains/arm) is the current solution. Other versions of GCC are currently being attempted as well.