Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2012 10:24:15 -0700 From: John-Mark Gurney <jmg@funkthat.com> To: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> Cc: freebsd-embedded@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Looking for hardware advice Message-ID: <20120927172415.GO19036@funkthat.com> In-Reply-To: <201209271626.q8RGQ6nS011607@grabthar.secnetix.de> References: <201209271626.q8RGQ6nS011607@grabthar.secnetix.de>
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Oliver Fromme wrote this message on Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 18:26 +0200: > I'm sorry, this is probably off-topic, but I couldn't find > much useful information on the web. > > I'm looking for a small board that's well supported by > FreeBSD (head or stable/9). I recently picked up a BeagleBONE and I haven't done much with it, but it's working good... It's pretty darn small and has all the features your talking about.. Using Tim Kientzle's scripts[1], building an image from -HEAD is very easy... I'm even building the image from PCBSD9 VM... > It should ... > > - ... be as small as possible (physical size). 3.4" x 2.1" small enough for you? > - ... be available to the public without having to order > a crate of 1000. I need only one, maybe two. I picked up one from Digikey for $89 + shipping... > - ... work out of the box with head or stable/9, without > requiring a soldering iron, without having to patch > firmware with a hex editor and similar adventures. :-) It worked out of the box for me the first time... Right now there are a few issues w/ U-boot and USB power that I'm tracking down, but it shouldn't be hard... Just need to find the time... > - ... run from a single power line, preferably 12V DC or > something like that, with as low power consumption as > possible. I wouldn't mind if it could run from a bunch > of batteries either. I'm running of the USB power, but it has a 5V DC jack, and there is even a cape that will do battery power iirc... > - ... Support USB and some kind of wireless communication, > preferably Bluetooth (either built-in or via a USB-to- > Bluetooth adapter). No bluetooth, and I haven't tried a USB bluetooth adapter but I don't see why it wouldn't work... > - ... boot from flash (SD card, CF card or USB stick). Uses a micro SD card, and comes w/ a micro->normal SD adapter... > - ... have a bunch of GPIO pins to play with. Actually I > would like to port an old piece of software that used > the good old parallel port (in bit-bang mode), so I need > at least 12 or 13 I/O pins. Alternatively I could use a > USB parallel port adapter, but I'm not sure if those > support bit-bang mode. (And such an adapter would add > to the overall size, so I'd like to avoid that.) The expansion part has 65 GPIO according to the system reference manual... There are capes that make the GPIO's and other stuff easily accessable.. There is even one that includes a breadboard on it, also available from DigiKey.. > I do NOT need ethernet, VGA, audio, and so on. In fact > I'll probably compile a kernel without networking support. > Performance is not an issue, I don't intend to run number > crunching stuff or folding@home. ;-) RAM should be > sufficient to boot a stripped-down kernel with the modules > and software that I need (Bluetooth stuff, a shell, some > small programs). It's good you don't need etherenet as it freezes every 30 seconds or so... I haven't had time to try to debug it yet... One nice thing is that is has 256MB of ram, so you don't have to strip down the image that much... > Something like the Raspberry Pi would be cool (except that > the Pi has many features that I don't need, and it's not > supported by FreeBSD as of today). > > Any advice will be appreciated! Come over to freebsd-arm if you want to see more of what's going on... [1] https://github.com/kientzle/freebsd-beaglebone/ -- John-Mark Gurney Voice: +1 415 225 5579 "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."
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