It's a fan-less miniature single board computer that can run Linux from an SD card. Importantly, for my purposes, it features s-video and an USB port. Setup was not trivial, so I thought I'd share my solutions to some problems that others might also run into.
First, you need to communicate with the card through a serial port. None of my computers are sufficiently ancient to have a serial port. I bought a Mac-compatible USB to RS232 adapter. It did not come with required drivers, but these open source drivers worked for me.
Second, running screen in the OS X terminal produced nothing but garbage output and junk characters. The problem was the wiring of the DB9 connector that Mariusz kindly provided me with. This meant I finally got to do some soldering:
The beagleboard FAQ includes an image to compare the wiring with:
Third, there were some instructions for using a Mac to format the SD card using the fuse-ext2 driver. This did not work for me. Instead I used the script provided in these instructions on another laptop running Ubuntu Linux.
Fourth, booting the card failed with a mysterious "Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt" error. This turned out to be caused by insufficient current when powering the beagleboard through USB. Powering the board through an external power source fixed the problem.
Fifth, and finally (phew!), s-video out can be enabled by adding "omapdss.def_disp=tv omapfb.mode=tv:ntsc" to the bootargs environment variable. My head-mounted display accepts composite video, so I plugged in an s-video to RCA adapter. But the picture quality was horrible. Text was impossible to read on the fuzzy, flickering, bleeding, and snowing screen. I was about ready to give up when I discovered another bootargs parameter "omapdss.tvcable=composite". This did wonders, as demonstrated using my Dell monitor's composite video input:
Connecting an Apple keyboard and mouse worked flawlessly, resulting in the following setup:
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2 comments:
Impressive! Have you gotten the folding keyboard to work with it yet?
No, my D-Link DBT-120 bluetooth dongle doesn't even light up its LEDs when connected to the beagleboard. I'll try another bluetooth adapter soon.
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