BeagleBoard Community

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This page collects information about TI's ARM based OMAP3 Beagle Board.

Hardware

The Beagle Board is a low-cost, fan-less single-board computer based on TIs OMAP3 device family, with all of the expandability of today's desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise (from beagleboard.org). It uses a TI OMAP3530 processor (ARM Cortex-A8 Core ~600MHz + TMS320C64x+ DSP ~430MHz). See OMAP3530 features for more processor features. Target price is US-$149. The design goal was to make is as simple and cheap as possible, e.g. not having a LCD added, but letting you connect all add-ons available as cheap external components. See What is Beagle? page for more details.

Top view:

Beagle top notes.jpg

  • 1: OMAP3530 processor + 128MB DDR + 256MB NAND (PoP: Package-On-Package implementation for Memory Stacking)
  • 2: DVI chip
  • 3: DVI-D
  • 4: 14-pin JTAG
  • 5: Expansion connector: I2C, I2S, SPI, MMC/SD
  • 6: User button (boot select)
  • 7: Reset button
  • 8: USB 2.0 HS
  • 9: SD/MMC+
  • 10: RS-232 serial
  • 11: Alternate power (normally powered by USB)
  • 12: USB 2.0 HS OTG (Power)
  • 13: Stereo In
  • 14: Stereo Out
  • 15: S-Video
  • Board size: 3" x 3"
  • Currently 6 layer PCB; target: 4 layer

Bottom:

Beagle bottom.jpg

Availability

Currently it is planned that BeagleBoards will be available starting at June 2008 for target price $149 + shipping through beagleboard.org.

Adapters

JTAG

Depending on your JTAG tool, you'd need a 14-pin to 20-pin adapter to use an ARM debugger. The 14-pin TI JTAG connector is used on BeagleBoard and is supported by a large number of JTAG emulation products.

Note: JTAG on BeagleBoard uses 1.8V!

OpenOCD currently doesn't support BeagleBoard Cortex-A8, only Cortex-M3. If this support is added and the JTAG scan chain for OMAP3 is known, Flyswatter from tincan TOOLS for ~ $50 would be an ideal JTAG choice. It supports 1.8V and additionally has a RS232 interface.

RS232

The pinout on the beagle board is "AT/Everex" or "IDC10". You can buy IDC10 to DB9M adapters in many places as they are commonly used for old PCs. Depending on your local configuration, you may need a 9-Pin NullModem cable to connect BeagleBoard to serial port of your PC.

USB

The HS (HighSpeed) USB ECHI controller on OMAP3 on BeagleBoard supports high-speed only. This simplifies the logic on the device. FS/LS (FullSpeed/LowSpeed) devices, such as keyboards and mice, require going through a HS hub.

DVI

DVI-D connection on BeagleBoard uses a HDMI connector:

HDMI is backward-compatible with the single-link Digital Visual Interface carrying digital video (DVI-D or DVI-I, but not DVI-A) used on modern computer monitors and graphics cards. This means that a DVI-D source can drive a HDMI monitor, or vice versa, by means of a suitable adapter or cable, but the audio and remote control features of HDMI will not be available.

BeagleBoard can be connected to a DVI monitor using HDMI female to DVI male cable.

BootRom

OMAP3 on BeagleBoard contains a BootRom. With this, BeagleBoard can boot without any code in permanent storage (NAND) or from peripherals. This is useful for first board bring up or if your BeagleBoard is bricked. For more information about BootRom booting see SPRUFD6.

User button

With user button on BeagleBoard you can configure boot order. Depending on this button, the order used to scan boot devices is changed. The boot order is (the first is the default boot source):

  • User button not pressed: NAND -> USB -> UART -> MMC
  • User button is pressed: USB -> UART -> MMC -> NAND

Technically speaking, the user button configures pin SYS.BOOT[5]. See SPRUFD6 for more details.

Serial boot

To boot from USB or UART, you need a PC tool which talks with OMAP BootRom and speaks the correct protocol to download ARM target code to BeagleBoard. Currently there are two (experimental) tools for UART boot:

Unfortunately, there is no working target code yet which can be downloaded to BeagleBoard and executed on OMAP3 ARM. I.e. PC UART tools are there, but no success to boot BeagleBoard with these.

USB boot

For USB boot, there is currently one (experimental) tool to boot BeagleBoard over USB:

As with serial boot, there is no working target code yet.

MMC/SD boot

Currently, boot the BeagleBoard with MMC/SD is the only working way for first board bring up.

MMC/SD formatting

As described in above MMC/SD boot description, you have to create a bootable partition on MMC/SD Card. This can be done using e.g. Windows or Linux tools.

Windows

See HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool 2.0.6 description on boot the BeagleBoard with MMC/SD page.

Linux

tbd. The correct fdisk and mkfs.vat options are not known yet.

U-Boot booting

If your MMC/SD card formatting is correct and you put MLO, u-boot.bin and uImage on the card you should get a u-boot prompt after booting beagle board. E.g. (output from terminal program with 115200 8N1):

...40T.........XH.H.U�..Instruments X-Loader 1.41
Starting on with MMC
Reading boot sector

717948 Bytes Read from MMC
Starting OS Bootloader from MMC...

U-Boot 1.1.4 (Apr  2 2008 - 13:42:13)

OMAP3430-GP rev 2, CPU-OPP2 L3-133MHz
TI 3430Beagle 2.0 Version + mDDR (Boot ONND)
DRAM:  128 MB
Flash:  0 kB
NAND:256 MiB
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Audio Tone on Speakers  ... complete
OMAP3 beagleboard.org #

Using this u-boot prompt, you now can start kernel uImage stored on MMC card manually:

OMAP3 beagleboard.org # mmcinit
OMAP3 beagleboard.org # fatload mmc 0:1 0x80000000 uimage
OMAP3 beagleboard.org # bootm

If you like to make that happen every boot:

OMAP3 beagleboard.org # set bootcmd 'mmcinit ; fatload mmc 0:1 0x80000000 uimage ; bootm' ; saveenv

Code

Code and binaries for BeagleBoard are available at various places.

Attention: See koen's summary for status of code below.

Complete source and binaries

BeagleBoard pre-built binaries and source code can be found at Beagle source code and downloads page. Recent patches should go as fast as possible

Git

Besides above binary and source images, for X-loader there is a temporary git repository. Clone this using:

git-clone http://www.beagleboard.org/x-load.git xload-git

Note: Only http:// protocol works, git:// was never set up and port is still closed.

Note: This x-loader git repository for BeagleBoard is temporary. It is planned to move to http://source.mvista.com/git/?p=xloader.git;a=summary

Patches

Additionally to above code and binaries, there are some patches against recent upstream git repositories available:

Kernel:

U-Boot:

Compiler

CodeSourcery's ARM GNU/Linux tool chain is recommended.

Note: A user reports that he found the use of CodeSourcery tool chain version 2007q1-21 as strange. He has been using 2007q3-53 for a couple of months now.

Links

Other OMAP boards

  • OMAP1 OMAP5912 (ARM9 + C5x DSP) based OSK board.
  • OMAP3 OMAP3430 based Zoom MDK
  • OMAP3 OMAP3530 based Pandora
  • OMAP3 OMAP35x based EVM from Mistral and TI (both are the same)