Beagle Board Validation - First Contact

Today the two ordered Beagle Board arrived from IDA Systems through courier(pretty fast service !!).

We(me and Abinesh) sat down to do the most basic Validation Test of the BeagleBoard.

The most basic minimum things required are :-
1. Beagle Board - Rev C3
2. USB OTG - USB cable ( for powering BeagleBoard)
3. DB9 Connector (for connecting to serial port of PC)
4. 10 pin FRC box connector (for connecting to RS232 pins on BeagleBoard)

Luckily I managed to get USB OTG cable from the Nexys-2 FPGA kit.

The above images are USB OTG cable, comparision of OTG and normal USB connector, 10 pin FRC Box connecctor, DB9 connector.

The first thing to test is to power up BeagleBoard, by connecting the OTG connector to the USB OTG connector just on top of 5V DC supply jack and connect the other end to USB Port of PC.

                      

 

As soon as power is On , PWR Led(D5) glows and after a delay of few seconds , three other Leds glows up(D6,D7,D12).

Press reset switch and see that Led D6,D7 turn Off and after releasing Reset Switch ,turns on after a delay of around 3-4 seconds.

After Power On test , turn off the power by disconnecting the USB from PC , now connect the 10 pin connector to BeagleBoard RS232 pins as shown above.

On the DB9 connector(female) solder pins no 2(Rx), 3(Tx) and 5(gnd). Now connect pin 2,3,5 to pin 2,3,5 on the 10 pin RS232 pins on BeagleBoard.  

An easy way to identify pins on RS232 connector is to look for pin marking 1, 2, 9, 10 on Beagle Board.

After making the connection between DB9 connector and 10 pin Box connector, connect the DB9 into Serial Port of PC.

Open Hyperterminal on Windows and set the following settings :-

BAUD RATE - 115200,

DATA - 8 bit,

PARITY- none,

STOP - 1bit,

FLOW CONTROL - none

start the session with the above settings.

Now turn on power and you should see the following appear on Hyperterminal Screen.

This is the most you can do without a SD Card. The main page which has details about Validation of BeagleBoard is here .

..

Beagle Board Ordered and waiting

So through  Robotics Research Centre I managed to order 2 Beagle Board and also Dell Ultrasharp 1708FP LCD Monitor to hook up to DVI-D connector on Beagle Board.


Right now we have access to one Beagle Board in IIIT-H and till now several things have been tried out like VNC to make use of monitor of PC for displaying the video of Beagle Board.


Once our Beagle Board arrives , I will try to put a lot of documentation on the procedure to follow on Beagle Board



..

Win Free Hawk Board

Hawk Board community has announced an open contest for Early Adopters. Propose an idea to implement on Hawk Board and you could win your own Hawk Board for free !!!!

Hurry the deadline is 30th November.

Post your proposal  here

 Hawk Board Community Page

Yes I will apply and hope to grab one of it !!!!     :)

USB Bootloader Kit for ATmega16/32

For working on AVR microcontrollers and particularly if the person is a beginner , it greatly helps if he is shielded from the Hardware or the circuit making aspect for the time being until he gain certain minimum proficiency in programming AVRs.

When this idea of introducing AVR Microcontroller as a new course of Embedded Hardware Design was formulated by Prof RN Biswas based on my request that IIIT already has a legacy of AVR in robotics, so it was required to have a platform which which make this exercise of teaching and doing Lab Experiment on AVR a reality.

Prof RNB is very particular about courses and he takes care that they are structured properly and with indepth planning.
I was already involved in designing the AVR Kits for Robocamp at that time and after seeing its design, he wanted a new design in which only PORTs interconnections and USB link to Laptop is present, so that the breadboarding part is done hands on by the students.

Finally after making lots of layouts of a kit wired around ATMega16 and after taking care o lot of issues, this was the final design of AVR USB Bootloader Kit.

Features:-
1. USB Bootloader enabled, directly dump your hex file into the controller.
2. LCD(removable) connections through Burg Strip.
3. Connections to all PORT pins.
4. ISP connector
5. Powered through USB cable or external power supply.
6. LCD can be powered independently.
7. Slide Switch for enabling Bootloader.
8. LEDs for power & bootloader condition.
9. On Board 12MHz crystal.

The USB Bootloader firmware was avliable at Thomas Fischl(of the USBasp fame) and from Objective Development.
The Bootloader is the USP of this kit.

This kit was designed keeping in mind the experiments that the Students of Embedded Hardware Design, Microprocessor Based System Design and Embedded Systems-1 for UG2, UG3 and PG1-VLSI respectively needs to perform using Atmega16 microcontroller.

The Silkscreen of the circuit is shown



and also the kit in being use during a stepper motor experiment

Back Side of PCB

                                                                   Front Side of PCB



The Resolution is pretty bad for want of a better Camera, anyways the size of PCB is 10*6 cm.


The base circuit of USB Bootloader Kit for ATmega8 is

For making the kit with ATmega16 , the following changes need to be done in the firmware:
1. Change the D+ & D- pins to what is convenient to your design , though keep D+ to INT0 to avoid major changes in firmware.

2. Change the Bootloader address in the firmware, the compiled code that comes is according to ATmega8 whose memory size is 8KB , so the starting address of the Bootloader program(size 2KB) is 6KB. In case of Atmega16 whose memory size is 16KB , the starting address of Bootloader code 14KB (16KB-2KB).

3. Compile the changed code.

4. Before dumping the Bootloader code into the controller, have a 12MHz crystal connected in circuit and do all three steps together ie setting Fuse bits(High and Low) and writting the Bootloader code.

5. We are using HIDBoot Utility to dump the code into the controller using ISP.

6. In case the procedure is not successful, you can try that again , since the controller does not get bricked.


The Pdf of Layout of USB Bootloader Kit

USB Bootloader Kit User Manual


 - Any Queries are most welcome !!! :)

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.