

BeagleBoard X-15 - tdicola
http://www.elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoard-X15

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ISL
Can HNers point toward a purpose-built system-on-a-board for data acquisition
tasks? I keep seeing improvement in compute capability with Arduinos, RPis,
BeagleBoards, etc. , but no movement in ADC precision.

Arduinos are wonderful for handing off to a student for a quick DAQ job, but
invariably we require higher precision once they get things working, which
requires additional engineering from our end.

Price <$100, 4+ 14-16-bit ADCs at 1-2 kSamples/s, 2+ 10+-bit DACs, reasonably
stable clock?

~~~
harshreality
Nothing at that price I can recall, but you're looking for a watered-down Red
Pitaya? (A single board doesn't have enough 14 bit inputs, but in all other
ways, particularly frequencies, it exceeds those specs?)

~~~
ISL
Really watered-down, yeah. It might be more appropriate to think, "arduino
with higher-resolution inputs". It's really the Arduino ADC resolution that is
a major headache for us.

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tdicola
Interesting new board from the BeagleBoard.org Foundation that designs the
BeagleBone Black and other embedded Linux boards. Has a dual core ARM Cortex
A15 processor and what appears to be a lot of peripherals like USB ports,
ethernet ports, etc.

More good info here too: [http://www.cnx-
software.com/2014/11/07/beagleboard-x15-devel...](http://www.cnx-
software.com/2014/11/07/beagleboard-x15-development-board-to-feature-ti-
sitara-am5728-dual-core-cortex-a15-processor/) Looks like the SoC is quite
full featured and includes a couple Cortex M4 cores, presumably for realtime
logic like the PRU's in the BeagleBone Black, and even a DSP.

~~~
tmuir
The PRUs are a waste of perfectly good silicon until there is a C compiler for
them. I haven't seen any project outside of TI's demos that uses these in any
advanced fashion.

It sounds like an excellent idea. Completely separate processors on the same
memory bus that allow higher IO speeds than the main processor. But since it
can only be coded in assembly, Altera SOCs are much more attractive. Instead
of cortex M4s, there is an FPGA on the same chip. Instead of making the
interprocessor feature a crippled afterthought, the FPGA/ARM interface is
central to the system, and the bus can be made as wide as practical. Since you
can create the precise peripheral to suit your application on the FPGA, its
kind of a blank slate.

Edit: As it turns out, there is now a C compiler for the PRU, 3 years after
the hardware was released.

[http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/PRU-
ICSS_Getting_Sta...](http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/PRU-
ICSS_Getting_Started_Guide)

~~~
rasz_pl
When I read nonsense like that I immediately think you meant C++, or java, or
python.

Embedded is hard, If you cant handle assembler you wont be able to handle
verilog either.

~~~
tmuir
Except that there is no way to scale assembly. You write every instruction.
There are no companies that offer prewritten assembly for different common
functions. Toga vendors offer all sorts of ip.

Understanding assembly and choosing to develop with assembly are two different
things.

I see absolutely no correlation between learning assembly and learning
verilog. They are about as orthogonal as you can get.

------
wmf
It's interesting that TI "got out of the OMAP business" but now they're making
chips that are basically OMAP under a different name.

~~~
joezydeco
I was thinking the exact same thing. Cortex-A? IVA? This is an OMAP6.

But it also looks like a remix of the "Jacinto 6" architecture they've been
pushing around for a while.

[http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1315978](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1315978)

I mean, _10 UARTs_? That just screams automotive. Can't think of anything else
that would benefit from all this I/O. And, really, automotive is the only
battlefield left for TI (and Freescale's i.MX). Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm
have locked up the handheld arena.

~~~
lgeek
> Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm have locked up the handheld arena.

Not really. Many low end to mid range devices use Allwinner, Rockchip,
MediaTek or Amlogic SoCs. NVIDIA's Tegra series has also been somewhat popular
and the two K1 SoCs are really nice.

~~~
joezydeco
Was describing the fates of TI and Freescale more than the second-tier SoC
groups. The larger chipmakers aren't getting back into Apple or Samsung's shop
any time soon. And making small design wins for third-world handsets doesn't
interest them.

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progman
I am glad that there are new Linux compatible boards on the market almost
every week.

[http://linuxgizmos.com](http://linuxgizmos.com)

I have the impression that the competition of Linux implemented
UEFI/SecureBoot just to lock Linux out from "their" boards. I wish the Linux
community would stop to support UEFI systems completely. Linux pretending to
be "Win 8.1" to outsmart the bootloader is _not_ an acceptable solution.

The Linux community has a much better choice in embedded boards, and they
should support the makers of those boards instead of buying UEFI products.
There are a lot of boards which are powerful enough to be used as full blown
office PCs. Soon we will even have ARM quad cores with 4 GB, dual HDMI and
full SSD support. This is the way to go!

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A_COMPUTER
Am I right that this thing has ECC RAM? Could this work as a (relatively)
inexpensive ZFS NAS?

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Alupis
why only dual core!?!?!?!?!

This thing would be amazing, if it were quad.

I think I'll still go with the wandboard for now (quad core arm A9, 2GB ddr3,
sata port, 2 microSD slots, gigabit ethernet, etc)

~~~
wmf
Here's a quad A15:
[http://www.arndaleboard.org/](http://www.arndaleboard.org/)

