A recently released OMAP3530 based development board is now available for purchase from Digi-Key. The BeagleBoard is a small, cheap and simple development kit. Using the Cortex-A8 core, it provides a 600MHz processor (the equivalent of more than 1GHz of ARM11 MIPS), 128MB ram, and 256MB flash.

The OMAP3530 core also provides features such as OpenGL ES 2.0 capable 2D/3D graphics, and an HD capable DSP for video compression/decompression.

For purchasing information, visit the Digi-Key site: http://www.digikey.com/Beagleboard/

For more technical details, visit the BeagleBoard homepage:

When using a smaller ARM micro, without the benefit of large amounts of SDRAM, often some kind of specialised real-time operating system must be used to provide the kind of functionality that modern software required (Threads, Mutexes, TCP/IP, Wifi etc...). There are numerous options available, ranging from freely available open-source solutions, to well supported vendor-supplied solutions. When evaluating a new system for a Cortex-M3 core on a recent design, we investigated 3 options:

• IAR PowerPac
• RL-ARM Realtime Library
• FreeRTOS

These represent a reasonable selection, each providing a similar array of functionality. The final decision depends greatly on the tools that the developer is already familiary with. RL-ARM works best when already using the Realview/Keil tools suite and PowerPac for the IAR Workbench. FreeRTOS comes with project files for a variety of different environments, include Keil, Rowley, IAR and GCC. In the end the decision depends on the project requirements, budget, and tools availability, and for our project we choose the IAR PowerPac, as the tools were already being used by the customer.

In conjunction with our Bigeye 3MP camera system, we have begun work on a PTP/IP implementation. This allows camera systems to be managed remotely over a network, using a standard IP protocol, facilitating interaction with a range of pre-existing camera management suites. The system should also be compatible with Microsoft's MTP system, allowing it native integration with Windows Vista. http://gphoto.sourceforge.net/