To everyone that has been following the development of the BeagleTraveler, I apologize for the delay of additional information. I have received a BeagleBoard from the kind people at Texas Instruments ( thanks Cathy and Jason).
First impressions: The board is a true development platform with many operating systems to support the hardware. Un-boxing the Beagle left me wondering about the design trade offs the engineers had to make. Many peripherals to connect to and make the Beagle usable… I wish that there were more USB ports as well as more support for wireless HIDs (human interface devices).
A powered USB hub is a good investment and requirement for multiple USB peripherals , although I have had problems getting one to work with the Beagle for HID equipment. Any ideas from the community on this would be a great help.
Booting the Angstrom distro was pretty straight forward. If you are new to the BeagleBoard and have downloaded the Angstrom image, be sure to rename the files to MLO, Uboot.bin etc.., removing the rev-c3 gibberish on each of the filenames. Of course many developers in the embedded community realize that bootloaders need specific requirements to load kernels, etc. I really enjoyed playing with the board and the distro. Getting the console to output on a Windows PC through hyperterm is a little cumbersome. What I figured out was to connect the power then the USB cable within a couple of seconds (read- quickly) and then quickly start the saved BeagleBoard config file in Hyperterm. The console sometimes would not connect so I would simply “hang up” the terminal, press the reset button wait a second or two and “call” the Beagle from Hyperterm again.
Until I get my Ubuntu system set up for dev, I will be stuck with Windows for development. This limits what I can do with the Beagle at this time.
If anyone can send some *.img.bz files of Android or other BB builds, I can use a utility such as Self Image to flash my SD with on Windows. Another device I have uses a flash device for Ubuntu and I can flash the entire drive very quickly instead of doing a typical install of 9.0.4… Formating the SD under windows is the biggest problem. Tools such as Paragon Partition Manager and the HP USB formatting tool work well but one is not free and the other is only for FAT32.
Beagle Board Development 