BeagleBone Black PRU: Hello World

This article presents what is meant to be the simplest possible example of using the PRU (programmable realtime unit) on the BeagleBone Black single-board computer. The example program has no inputs and no outputs; it does nothing other than delay for a fixed duration then exit. Read on after the jump…

Pogoplug SAN using AoE

pogoplugThe Pogoplug E02 is a Linux-capable embedded computer with gigabit Ethernet and USB connectivity. It can be found quite cheap (US$35 or so) on the secondary market. As it was originally sold as a storage appliance for home users, it ships with somewhat inflexible factory firmware. However, it is reasonably easy to replace the bootloader with one which can boot an arbitrary Linux distribution.

Once I got my Pogoplug running Debian, it was surprisingly easy to set it up as network storage using ATA-over-Ethernet. Details after the jump.

Linux on Zipit: Debian

This is a followup to my original article about using a general-purpose Linux distro on the Zipit Z2 messenger. In this post, I’ll discuss my experience installing Debian (specifically, Emdebian Grip) on the Zipit. This is a significant improvement over the previous process, as it means you can automatically upgrade and install new packages from an extensive repository of pre-compiled software. You can just “apt-get install whatever” instead of having to create a cross-development environment and compile everything yourself. Details after the jump.

Linux on Zipit

Update: Please see my newer Debian on Zipit article for a better installation process.

This is an article about running Linux on the Zipit Z2 instant messaging device. Or rather, it is about running a general-purpose Linux distro, since the device out-of-the-box runs a Linux kernel with proprietary userland software.

Why is this interesting? With a list price of US$50 (and sale prices approaching half that), this device can be an SSH client, DOSbox, NES emulator, video streamer, music player and/or IRC client.

Since the state of documentation seems to be lagging behind the state of development on this device, I’m using this post as an information dump about all the things I found a hassle to figure out (and hope to save others that same hassle).