Hey,
I'm pretty new to the BeagleBoard and it's a little overwhelming at
first. There are so many configuration combinations even just when it
comes to setting the board up that I had trouble figuring out exactly
what I needed. I started off with the GUI based Angstrom Demo that I
found here: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardBeginners but it was a little
more than I needed so I'm cutting it back to a more minimal
installation. Right now I'm building my own image on the Angstrom site
that has console only so I can just connect to it over serial on my
laptop running Ubuntu. I don't think I need a GUI so connecting
through a terminal using minicom seems fine to me, assuming I can do
everything I need to.
There are a few things I want to get involved in on this board, and
I've been researching and scouring the web for sources but I haven't
had much luck so I'm hoping you guys can point me in the right
direction. This is going to be a little long, so I apologize in
advance, but I figure the more detail I give about what I'm looking
for, the more likely I am to find what I need (or at least a push in
the right direction because right now I don't even know where to
turn).
I want to measure a few different performance parameters for some
processor intensive applications. For now, my target applications are
compression (bzip, likely) as well as mpeg decoding. I would like to
find either pre-built applications or I am completely willing to write
my own with the help of some libraries. I would also like to play
around with tweaking the applications to make versions that do and do
not support the thumb mode (this is one of the most important parts).
As far as development goes, I would like to program in C. I have found
information about developing and compiling directly on the board as
well as cross compiling for the BeagleBoard from my Ubuntu machine. I
really don't have much of a preference between these two, though as
far as debugging and testing goes, developing, compiling and running
directly on the board would be easiest so I don't need to move the SD
card back and forth between the board and my laptop each time I try
something new. Especially considering I'm going to have the serial
cable plugged in and the SD card sits right underneath it making it
impossible to get out.
I'm using board revision C4, if that changes anything. I'm hoping that
within the next couple hours (once this image finishes downloading and
I get it to boot), it will be up and running and I can at least get
some kind of hello world program to run on it. Any suggestions, help,
and links are greatly appreciated. If there's something about my setup
that isn't optimal please let me know. As I said, I'm really just
starting with this board so a lot of this is very new to me. Most of
my embedded systems experience has been with much less powerful
devices (Atmel STK board with ATmega8 and 8515 chips, as well as an
Arduino board, but I can't remember which chip is on there for now).
So really any information at all about anything I've mentioned would
be appreciated. I've been struggling to find many comprehensive
tutorials on getting things set up for this board, so I've been as a
loss of where to go.
Thanks for any help.