my work status - OMAPL hawkboard and OMAP3 beagleboard

Again took long time to return .... :)

My friends say I need to correct my attitude on blogging as they are frustrated with my inconsistent blogging, few say talk technical and few want this to be generic.

I am more cautious of blogging, I don't want to say some thing that is misunderstood or irrelevant. It takes significant time to think and write.

So, coming to next question from community - what am I doing these days. Some time back a community member asked about not posting patches on OMAP mailing lists, not present on beagle IRC, not on doing any updates to code.google.com/p/beagleboard wiki inspite of many requests, ...

Just thought of highlighting my acitivities - might look like a status report to my boss he he he he

- As part of a small team (as usual) started a initiative called hawkboard to address the growing need of industrial, instrumentation and Floating point DSP application with an Open Platform. More info about this project can be found at http://hawkboard.org. This is taking 70% of time, man it is so difficult to make a hardware, get designing, handling customs, shipping, huh... I will never indulge in making a board again :) .. I can now understand or feel the pain Gerald Coley might have been through while coming up with beagle board :).

- Looking at porting OpenCV libraries on C674x Floating point DSP, no major break through yet.

- Was very much looking forward to start a portal called dspisopen.com to address and bridge the gap between and Open Linux and bit Closed DSP world, nothing progressed after buying the domain :(

- Started a initiative called beagleclinic in India, I am very happy about this initiative as there is very good responce from local beagle community, it is supposed to be held last saturday of every month, but not this month as I was at Pune for beagle, DM355, OMAPL trainings. Also there is long weekend being celebrated in India.

- With the help of TI, Embinux we were able to conduct a workshop for Android on BeagleBoard, very very positive reponse, initially I thought it would not cross 30 numbers but it happened to gather 300 members from various parts of India. Good event, we got mixed reponse about the content, obiviously when the audience is mixed it is difficult to meet everyones expectations. Embinux team did a good job here, we also have listed down the mistakes that we should be correcting in our next workshop

- We were able to get memory hole issue fixed for OMAP3 with help of Russell (RMK), good patch, but to get to the root cause it took us a while.

- Working on OMAPL 138 to get some good features on board, we got netconsole support in u-boot thanks to Anant gole and Sekhar Nori for digging out the patch we missed in u-boot, we have to get this on OMAP3 u-boot, really cool feature to have for remote software upgrades.

- We were able to work out a deal to get IDA systems as official distributor to sell beagle boards in India, the cost for beagleboard should come down a bit now as we will looking towards manufacturing beagleboards in India. Thanks to Gerald C, CircuitCo and IDA systems for helping the India community.

- Conducted trainings at multiple IEEE hosted trainings and workshops on beagleboard. Good one was at IIT kharagpur the team was very promising, hope to see some good contributions soon.

Past is always Past, what next ..... in priority

- I have cool XDS 100 V2 to test at my desk, will have to do this ASAP

- Get hawk flying... the current issue is the cost is bit high, working on getting in reduced in all possible ways. Mainly by irritating the stake holder ha ha ha ha

- Still some blocking items like SATA, NAND and USB OTG have to be tested while typing this blog, I am waiting for board to be made available by the hardware teams... :). Yet to find good tests to validate Composite In and VGA (Got some help on timings from Frank W).

- Submit patches to get support for hawkboard in Davinci GIT tree, hope Kevin approves all my patches :)

- Getting more good demos for launch, don't know what.. and think about the launch date. We don't have a disty signed yet...

- I think most of us know that OMAP DSP Link will move to some thing called Syslink .. I have been assigned to work on getting this to community to get initial feedback on source, just waiting for a correct version to get this to community.... I understand community way is to ”Release early, release often” ... but we should have some thing good to release early and then we will release often :)

- Will focus on DSP components, Gagan and team has built simple examples to show the usage of DSP in a multi core platform like OMAP.

- Have to get some thing working out of OpenCV on Floating point DSP. Not sure when and how I will be able to start this activity

- Want to conduct beagle clinics in different Cities in India mainly Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune as there are many requests from these regions.

- I have to cleanup code.google.com/p/beagleboard wiki, it is the ugliest site I have ever seen because it is maintained by me :(... I should do this, I should have worked on MMC u-boot compilation error reported by Dirk Behme, didn't get any chance to look at this. Hope we have resolved this now ... :)

- I prefer to host a GIT tree for beagle with latest kernel where all peripherals have been tested to work and have some performance numbers against each of the drivers and a test plan. Mainly the USB, PM, DSS2 and V4L. Some good place for 3D SGX tutorials and DSP...

- Leopard is on list, but not sure if I will get some time out of OMAP3 and OMAPL 138 tasks..

- I would love to conduct a Open Source Symposium in Bangalore in India, highlighting the Open source offering and community efforts on OMAP, DM, OMAP L, etc. Hope I will be able to get some sponsorships and mainly some free time to do the same. Any one want to sponsor this event, please get in touch with me ..... ha ha ha ha ...

So, it is going to lot of fun with OMAP L, but Nov will be more fun with OMAP3 Beagle ...

Let me see how much of these could be accomplished in a minimal time..

hawk hasn't arrived yet, let me try to post some thing on http://hawkboard.wordpress.com

Good Luck, happy Dassera (Indian Festival).