LED display @ Maker Faire
LED Display
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Category Archives: Hardware
U-Boot on BeagleBone Black
Understanding the boot up mechanism of the BeagleBone Black is important to be able to modify it. As we later want to change the Linux Kernel itself we need to know how it is started by the BeagleBone.
The AM335x processor on the BeagleBone Black has many configurable options where it can boot from which are all documented in Chapter 26 of the AM335x ARM® Cortex™-A8 Microprocessors Technical Reference Manual. The BeagleBone Black provides by alternative boot sequences which are selectable by the boot switch (S2). Continue reading
BeagleBone Black
For my recent electronics projects I wanted something more powerful than the usual Atmel megaAVR or AVR XMEGA microcontrollers I used in the past. The obvious step upwards in performance is some embedded system running Linux. A few years ago I played a little bit with an ALIX.3D3 embedded board, but nowadays most people would start with a Raspberry Pi and I also used to have an early model of those as well. Even though the Raspberry Pi seems to be everywhere there is a better alternative in my view: The BeagleBone Black. The most obvious advantage of the the Raspberry Pi (even compared to the Model B) is the much high flexibility concerning I/O. Most important it provides with its general-purpose memory controller (GPMC) a high-bandwidth parallel memory interface which is ideal for a fast interconnection e.g. with FPGAs.
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Apple Wish List
I really like my Apple products as you might have read in the my way to Apple blog post, but there are still some things I want to have changed or improved. In former times when I used Gentoo Linux on conventional PC hardware, most of these thing could have been fixed on my own. So this is more or less the only disadvantage of using Apple products.
In the hope of some apple execute to be bored and browsing the web, I want to give a list of all the changes and improvements I would like to see on future Apple products. For most of the points I already filled a feedback form on the Apple Feedback page or sent an email to Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. I you like some of my suggestions, feel free to do the same! Continue reading
My way to Apple
My desktop (Windows) and server (Linux) in 1999
A few years ago, I couldn't imagine to use a Apple Macintosh someday. My first computer was a Intel 80486 PC running Windows 3.11. Though I already installed my first SuSE Linux on that 484 machine wiping accidentally the primary partition I stayed with operating systems from Microsoft on my desktop until Windows XP. Then I decided to switch to Gentoo Linux on my desktop which I had used on my servers for quiet sometime. I left a copy of Windows on a dual-boot partition for gaming and some applications like Photoshop which have no Linux version. Continue reading