Beagleblog

Conspiracy against Theora video codec?

May 02, 2010 GMT

Again, it is Steve Jobs who is the messenger of bad news (see the previous blog post for more). In a reply an email of Free Software Foundation's Hugo Roy who took the liberty to publish it, Jobs says that someone is going after the free Theora video codec:"All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source."

Apple's Steve Jobs is spreading FUD on Flash

Apr 29, 2010 GMT

Starting with the presentation of the iPad there was a flamewar going on between Flash lovers and haters in thousands of comments on various blog sites. Haters welcomed Apple's decision to not allow the Adobe Flash player on the iPad and saw the future of the multimedia web in HTML5. Flash proponents, on the other hand, said that HTML5 is just not ready and even if it was some things just aren't possible. Both were speculating on the Apples motivation to disallow Flash content on their iDevices, culminating in a recent change of their SDK license that was obviously targeted against the recently released Adobe Flash CS5 program that allowed developers to compile Flash content into native...

Baking Bits

Jan 07, 2010 GMT

To build the Angstrom distribution from source you need to set up the Openembedded environment. With help from the build tool Bitbake it can cross compile software for many embedded targets on a host PC. You will find Bitbake in the repositories of many standard Linux distributions. However I had some problems with the tool shipped in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, so I just downloaded the Bitbake source and installed it. Just download the package from the web site, unpack it and execute »python setup.py install« as root.You can get the Openembedded environment from the Git repository. For this I created a directory called »OE« in my home directory: cd mkdir OE cd OE git clone...

USB Woes

Jul 25, 2009 GMT

[edit: this blog post is about the Beagleboard Rev B. As Jason Kridner points out in the comments, Rev C features two USB ports, so you can use one for host mode and the other as a USB slave]I have been using the Beagleboard with a terminal connection over the serial line for quite a while. But now I want to attach keyboard and mouse to use it as a standalone computer. For this I need a USB hub because the board only features a mini USB port. If you are going to just connect the hub to it you won't have much fun because the Beagleboard doesn't find the peripherals. The reason for this is that the USB controller chip on the board can operate as a master as well as a slave. Usually, when...

OMAP everywhere

Jul 06, 2009 GMT

My preoccupation with the Beagleboard has made me more aware of ARM and in particular OMAP based hardware products. Even more so as I am very much interested in low power computing and rumour has it that ARM cores use a lot less power than any i386 architecture including Atom chips. In my view using ARM cores with an additional DSP (which can be seen as a kind of asymmetrical multi-core) is a good fit for low power computers with an occasional need for high performance multimedia computing such as video decoding.So I got pretty excited when Dell announced an ARM based laptop a while ago which is supposed to have a "multi-day" battery life. (Dell also does Via Nano based rack...

...and there was light

Jul 02, 2009 GMT

I got mail! Snail mail, that is. It's a package from Lyon in the south of France where Texas Instruments' DLP subsidiary is located (did you know that the DLP projector technology is owned by TI? see Wikipedia for more). Peeling away the packaging layer after layer I finally get to the actual package that contains the micro projector. After opening it I grab something small and black, but it's just the power supply. Finally I manage to find the projector which is really really tiny, about the size of a match box. Under a double bottom there's the requisite cable for attaching the DLP projector to the Beagleboard (it's HDMI to Mini-HDMI). After connecting it to the board the first thing...

Connecting to the world

Mar 20, 2009 GMT

Controlling the Beagleboard over a serial line with a terminal program such as Minicom is working just fine, but it's much more convenient to have a real network connection. For instance to update the Linux distribtion on the SD card without having to unplug it and plug it into a PC's card reader. There's just one little obstacle to overcome: The board does not feature either an Ethernet port or a Wifi chip :)Luckily the Linux kernel programmers are providing a solution to that problem for quite some time: You can use the USB interface for networking, too. So I just connect the Beagleboard to the computer with a USB cable in addition to the serial connection I am using to control the...