Beagle Board & Hawk Board

I am sick with writing about that Travel Memories, so something fresh is the need of the hour.

Some months back EFY(Electronics For You) carried an article about Open Source Hardware and Beagle Board was the main focus for that. Since my interest lied in getting a DSP Board for implementing my Final Year Project, so I kept Beagle Board at the back of my mind. Sometime Later when I searched on net about it, I was hooked with this tiny sexy looking board with a ton of features !!!
(Btw I am trying to get access to an Analog DSP Board for the project work)

Beagle Board is a Fan Less Single Board Computer based on TI's OMAP 35x processor.

leaving aside the specs, its clear that this small board 8cm*8cm packs a lot of punch. This offers an opportunity to port a OS on this Board and do all the mouth watering interesting stuffs and Electronics guy would love to do. For me it offers a leap up from the world of Microcontrollers to OS level designs.

As usual after getting hooked up to this, I tried to go through several resources online and found that in India, the cheapest supplier is IDASystems , the present cost being Rs 9K , w/o any thing else other than the board itself.


Later on I digged one more interesting thing - The Hawk Board. This is also a SBC, but based on less powerful OMAP L 138. Right now this board is under development and will be available in near future.

The Best part about Hawk Board is that first it has a VGA port meaning , a normal person need not buy a separate HDMI capable monitor for displaying from Beagle Board, and also it has Ethernet port(RJ45) and the best but not the least it might cost less than half of Beagle Board !!!

But I think if am able to arrange for an HDMI monitor than I am going to buy a Beagle Board soon rather than Hawk Board(since I feel open source support for Beagle Board is more dominant)

I am so much wanting to do some Real Time Image processing on Beagle Board.


Any new developments will be posted :)

Travel - Part 7 - Madurai

(this post is in continuation of  Travel - Part-6- Reching Madurai  dated Oct 3 2009)

Madurai is said to be the oldest town in peninsular India, and this thing is a surely a big asset of any great city. My first impression of Madurai was very different from other religious cities. The most important thing was that I saw that the city or the ares around the Temple was totally market and most importantly these markets were not catering to the temple inflow, but they were totally supporting the city economy.

It was not a good idea of ours to just take up a room in the nearest hotel that we found from our LZ(Landing zone :P), as a matter of fact there were several Hotels even nearer to the temple. So before it became any dark , I quickly went to a reconnaissance mission of the temple which we planned to visit early morning. I went around the periphery of the temple. It was good impression to see wide and clean walkway which provided lot of convenience to the visitors. Ohh I really forgot to mention, the first time I came near the temple , I was awestruck by the imposing Gopuram. The Gopuram can be said similar to most of the other temples(the other way I mean) , but the important thing was that each and every detail and carving was painted beautifully with different colours. It was a sight to see and the more you watch the more details you can observe.

After my walk around the temple I had I task to do. I had read that there is a Modern Restaurant near the temple and people like Mahatma Gandhi and J.L. Nehru had eaten there , so I was very exited to find this place and eat there. The location was precise just behind YMCA. I had a coffee and Idly at the place, since my purpose was to find out if this was the actual Modern restaurant. I tries asking the proprietor about that but I got a sort of cold response. So sad that a place of such a history is not exploiting or atleast displaying it with proud and though the whole temple was in center of a large market , I cold not find fruit sellers in the market.

Early next morning we went to Darshan of Meenakshi Ammam Temple. Though I was aware that cameras are allowed I did not took it, just because I though it would not be in sync with the serious sentiments and devotion of the people who visit the temple.

...

Travel - Part 6 - Reching Madurai

We booked two seats in a 2*2 Pushback type Minibus for getting to Madurai. The minibus was a sort of guided tour as it stopped to some of the Temples in Rameswaram to allow the people to visit them. On the Pamban Bridge the Bus stopped again and hence I got the opportunity to spend some time on the Bridge and more interestingly take some good snaps of this interesting location.

Then the bus started and the rest of the journey was not very consequential and so I just partly slept and partly observed the surrounding , the towns on the way , and the people.

It took around 4 hrs to reach the Madurai and the bus dropped us near the South gate of the Temple.