New year new toys

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During the last holidays I've been playing with a new Linux board that I've found quite interesting. It is an open project developed by a Spanish company which in turn enriched the Beagle Board idea with a lot of cool hardware: wifi, Ethernet, Bluetooh, RS-485, LCD controller, etc. They both share many other interesting peripherals as 3D accelerated graphics board featuring HDMI output, microSD memory socket, audio I/O and DSP,USB port, JTAG port etc.

The so called IGEPv2 (not sure it is a good name as I find it quite difficult to remember, maybe I'm aging) is a cool piece of hardware that comes with a Linux distribution name Poky and it based on an ARM Cortex-M8 processor running at 720Mhz that needs less than 3 watts for the whole system. It can run Ubuntu and many other ARM-based Linux distros. And it costs 140 Euros, which I reckon it is a sweet price.

Put it together with a large HD display and you have a point of information for the public. You may even hide the card inside the HDTV guts. And because it has both Ethernet and wifi it is going to be easy to be networked. Or you can add a hard drive to have a multimedia player box. Or just use networked storage for it.

Given the fact the processor has all the bells and whistles (memory management) it runs a normal version of Linux and not uCLinux. This basically means whatever you can develop on the Linux platform can run on it. Do you want an embedded server? Well, this can be a much better piece of hardware that SheevaPlug.

Comments

vierito5 said…
These boards are so cool, I can't wait to have some spare time and dig into them.

Do you know if they can properly manage a 720p/1080p video? Probably the CPU is not enough.

By the way, the name is IGEPv2, right? I also think it's a bit odd.
2:36 pm
Hiroshi Ikeda said…
That's really cool!!
Maybe I'll take a time to think about possible applications like mentioned before, a chearp adv point.
Good post!!!
Thanks!
5:01 pm
misan said…
Oops, thanks Javier, I meant IGEPv2(article fixed now). I think the point is made. Name is awkward and easy to miss-spell.

It can also be used to show elaborate medical images too :-)
7:47 pm
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