:!: Note: these are older boards (content last edited 2008-10-14 12:17:25 by [[/GavinAtkinson|GavinAtkinson]]).

The Texas Instruments OMAP CPUs are primarily designed for multimedia applications, but are used in a number of handhelds.  The family consists of CPUs based on ARMv7, ARMv9 and ARM Cortex A8 cores, often coupled with one or more DSPs, GSM/GPRS digital baseband and/or graphics accelerators.  It would be good to see if a port of %%FreeBSD%% to this family was feasable.  The CPU only seems to support the Thumb-2 instruction set.

The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Board|Beagle Board]] is a low cost board based around the OMAP3530 (ARM Cortex-A8 core, TMS320C64x+ DSP and %%PowerVR%% SGX530 GPU) that may be a good board to develop on.  It has 128Mb RAM, 256MbNAND Flash, JTAG, USB, RS-232, video out and sound. It lacks a network interface, but does have an expansion port including I2C, so it's possible ic(4) could be used for networking.

Also of interest may be the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)|Pandora console]], which is also based around the OMAP3530 CPU and runs Linux by default.  Although it is only available currently to developers, it may well prove to be a good dev platform as it appears to have RS232, accessible JTAG, an open developer community at [[http://www.openpandora.org/]] as well as being well documented.

Useful links:

[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAP]]\\ 
[[http://www.beagleboard.org]]\\ 
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)]]\\