原型101

我爱原型装置。初始启动检查我设计的作品就像我计划。大部分时间的答案是不,但这是一件好事。我已经开发出的许多东西是试图设计别的东西。我教授信贷技术写作在大学这里(好吧好吧,插入玩笑…)说,他不相信作家。你是烧坏了,厌倦了写作或你只需要写任何东西,直到一个想法来找你。现在,我一直相信,任何值得做的是价值超过这样做……我申请了这个浅显的智慧在许多事上。当我不感觉回到存储实验室里去补习friggen CCIE存储实验室,我刚刚登录并开始在没有目标或者目标。我知道这之前,极客本能。 Or going to see another dad gum romantic comedy with my Wife, I go thinking I'll take a nap and dream of chicken wings covered in mango habanero sauce but before I know it; I wonder if Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds are going to ever hook up in Alaska. Same goes with writing code sometimes. I really wish a had a ultra cool fab lab with a plasma cutter, rapid prototyper, pc milling machine, etc...here in the Code Cave but for now, my Wife and various zoning laws require me to look at other methods. Sometimes, I just want to goof around and try a few things while I watch FireFly and drink a cool Newcastle. No goal or objective, just putz around until something hits me. That is where the Beagle Board comes into play big time for me. http://beagleboard.org/ Now a Beagle Board is simply a very basic processing board based on the Texas Instruments OMAP 3530 ARM chipset. It can be turned into a PC, gaming platform (great for running MAME games), media center, door controller, whatever and where ever your imagination will take you. Officially, the Beagle Board OMAP proc supports Windows CE, QNX, Linux, Symbian OS but it is flexible enough to support many others. The board is great because it uses low power (5 volts) which means a USB socket can power it up. You interact with it via a serial cable. I use a break out box that I carry around in my bag o' junk but you can use a standard male-male DB9 null-modem cable, just break off pin 10 on the board (it's not used anyway). Hey look at that! You just became someone we all loath. The person that designs keyed cables!!! Out of the box the Beagle runs MiniComm and X-Loader from TI, so a quick and easy: sudo minicom -s gets you into the port config page where we can start prep'ing out the board for a new project. As a general ease of use rule, I run all of my OS's off of a SD card formatted with the correct ARM geometry which I can let the board do. Oh that reminds me. Be careful here! This is an ARM based processor and NOT a x86 one! Our OS MUST support the ARM instruction set which are conditionally executed. This means each instruction can execute as a NOP (No Operation) if the specified condition flags don't match the current status register flag state. Which is kinda cool since I can avoid all those friggen jumps around one or two instructions in x86. Of course the trade off here is the ARM can't do much with memory directly except load from and store to it. x86 can perform more operations directly on memory. anyway... Getting too deep into the code piece of this makes it seem more complicated then it is. Which it is not. The Beagle Board is a great way to get into project building for all kinds of stuff. It is easy to mess around with, low cost (149 bucks USD), powerful, and has a fantastic support community with step by step guides from getting started to building big projects. The point here is to keep moving forward. Even if you are just following along in the numerous guides you will learn so much about complex topics so fast, you will never ever look at networking gear the same way again. I have used the Beagle Boards to teach folks how to write their own file systems, learn JTAGGing, learning embedded systems, heck just the other day I built my son a Darth Vader voice changer out of it for a party, when I was done I erased it and started over with something new. Well my Wife is hitting me up to take her to see Date Night or something like that...maybe I can squeeze a nap in and dream of chicken wings and building a controller for my lightsabers...oh wait, that movie has Tina Fey in it right... Jimmy Ray Purser Trivia File Transfer Protocol Watermelon is more efficient at rehydrating our bodies than drinking water. It contains 92 percent water and essential rehydration salts.