/!\ Note: these are older boards (content last edited 2008-10-14 12:17:25 by 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 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 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)

arm/OMAP (last edited 2019-09-06T21:32:12+0000 by LorenzoSalvadore)