RidgeRun Blog

In case you have missed the buzz around the Touch Book, please take a look at the presentation video.

The summary is that is an OMAP35x based Netbook, heavily based on BeagleBoard, and running standard open source components. That provides very cool features like amazing battery life, but if you aren’t not a geek to get excited for that, there are some other nice things as well:

• Detachable screen from keyboard, making it a touch tablet
• Internal USB ports to avoid peripherals hanging around
• The screen have a magnetic part, allowing to dock into your refrigerator for example.
• 3D User interface.

I recall meeting Grégoire Gentil (founder of Always Innovating) during the last class we teach at ESC in Boston about 3D UIs. Of course at that point I didn’t know he was part of such a cool project . Seems like a smart guy, and I enjoyed the technical talk with him, so I’m looking forward for this product.

BeagleBoard, OMAP35x BeagleBoard, ESC, OMAP35x, OpenGL ES

Some time without posting (too much work).

Well, now it’s official. We have a active and supported community of people developing Gstreamer plugins for Texas Instruments System on Chips: Davinci family (Dm6446, DM6447, DM355, DM357) and OMAP (35x).

The project has been developed by Texas Instruments and is commercially supported by RidgeRun.

Currently it provides synchronized A/V for all the platforms, and image and video encoding on some of them. We are working on improvements to properly support seeking, fast forward, and reverse playback, as well making the plugins to properly integrate with playbin/decodebin (so they can be used in standard media players).

RidgeRun is providing support for it if you are using RidgeRun SDK (our favorite), MV environment (not so easy), and Beaglers favorite’s Angstrom (thanks to Koen and TI folks who worked along with us to demo it on ESC Silicon Valley).

A nice demo for beagleboard is provided by Koen of Big Bug Bunny running on the DSP with gstreamer TI plugins over a BeagleBoard.

Davinci, OMAP35x BeagleBoard, Davinci, DM355, DM6446, Gstreamer, OMAP35x

Well let’s face it, good embedded systems developers are still a rare breed. An embedded engineer takes a good mix of hardware and software skills, but a really good one also needs great communication and soft skills. We at RidgeRun are always looking for good embedded developers, and although we do our R&D in a wonderful country, with great investment on the high tech market and a growing technological environment, the embedded developers are still on short supply.

We have worked hard in the last six years with different players on the education sector to improve the skills for this market. The ITCR (the top tech university according to all tech sector surveys) has come to rescue with a new degree for computer engineering, and we are very happy that a member of our team (Miguel Aguilar) is giving the introductory course to embedded systems.

This is the first iteration of the course and it will be evolving over time, and by now is imparted to advance EE students. The course labs will be done with Texas Instruments MSP430 (16 bit microcontroller), and some BeagleBoards (32 bit SoC). On the software side they will be programming with Linux, and if time allows, DSP/BIOS for RTOS on the DSP of the Beagle.

I’m pretty sure Miguel will do a great job teaching, as he does as an outstanding engineer at RidgeRun. The first draft of the program course can be found here (in spanish).

Diego

Education BeagleBoard, Costa Rica, Education, msp430

If you are attending the upcoming ESC, please come by and say hi. I will be speaking on Diego’s most excellent 3D user interface presentation which is a roll-up-your-sleeves and get dirty hands-on activity using a BeagleBoard. I will also be doing the same showing off the latest in GStreamer plug-ins developed especially for the TI daVinci/OMAP chips. GStreamer makes it easy to add audio and video to your embedded product and with the daVinci/OMAP specific plug-in, it is lightning fast. Details at ECS website.

Todd

BeagleBoard, OMAP35x BeagleBoard, clutter, ESC, Gstreamer, OMAP35x, OpenGL ES

If you are involved, or would like to get started with embedded Linux development using BeagleBoard, and you happen to live or be visiting Costa Rica next week, don’t miss this session.

Next Thursday January 22th, Diego Dompe from RidgeRun will be giving a introductory session for members of the Costa Rica Linux User’s Group to the BeagleBoard project. The user group is composed by hobbies, EE and CS students from local universities. The class will be held at Lab #6 at Cenfotec facilities, at 6:30 p.m., but you can arrive early (from 6 p.m.) to play with the Rev C. board available.

The class is an introductory level talk for people getting interested in using BeagleBoard, and will cover the basics on the capabilities of the hardware (OMAP35x), and the software required to get started.

The class will be in spanish, but if you are english speaker you are welcome as well for the Q&A section. We will be posting the presentation in spanish later.

Si estás envuelto, o te gustaría empezar a desarrollar en Linux embedido usando la BeagleBoard, y vives o estás visitando Costa Rica la proxima semana, no te pierdas esta clase.

El próximo jueves 22 de enero, Diego Dompe de RidgeRun estará dando una clase introductoria para los miembros del grupo de usuarios de Linux de Costa Rica al proyecto BeagleBoard. El grupo de usuarios está compuesto por aficionados y estudiantes de ingenieria eléctrica y ingenieria en computación de las universidades locales. La clase será en el laboratorio #6 en las instalaciones de Cenfotec  a las 6:30 p.m., pero se puede llegar temprano (desde las 6 p.m.) para tener la oportunidad de usar la tarjeta Revision C que estará disponible.

La clase es de nivel introductorio para personas interesadas en usar BeagleBoard, y cubrirá la información básica sobre las capacidades del hardware (OMAP35x), y el software requerido para empezar a usar la tarjeta.

La clase será en español, pero anglo-parlantes son bienvenidos también. La presentación será publicada en por este medio posteriormente.

BeagleBoard, OMAP35x BeagleBoard, OMAP35x

Todd and I gave a couple of presentations at the Embedded System Conference 2008 (ESC) in Boston. Todd demoed gstreamer capabilities, and I talked about 3D user interfaces using clutter and OpenGL ES.

If you are interested you can find the whitepapers and presentations at http://beagleboard.org/demo/esc

BeagleBoard, OMAP35x BeagleBoard, clutter, ESC, Gstreamer, OMAP35x, OpenGL ES