Profile: BeagleBoard Organization
Julien Eid
Rationale
We chose the Beaglebone organization as lots of us have used either one of their products or a similar product like the Raspberry Pi. It's a really cool company that has lots of potential for helping people get really cool embedded projects off the ground.
Organizational Details
- Texas Instruments is a Publically Trading Corporation
- Originally founded as Geophysical Service Incorporated (1930)
- Founded as Texas Instruments (1951)
- GSI Founders:
- John Clarence Karcher
- Eugene McDermott
- TI Founders:
- Cecil H. Green
- J. Erik Jonsson
- Eugene McDermott
- Patrick E. Haggerly
- All the founders are dead
- IPO:
- Current Price $56.535
- Lots of acquisitions
- TI Invests more than $80M in University Research Projects
- 34,759 Employees as of 2012
- HQ in Dallas Texas
- Locations Worldwide
Communications
Communications channels
- Beagleboard has a blog that they have some announcements on as well as showing cool new projects.
- Beagleboard has a few mailing lists and forums.
- They also operate a video tutorial website for common issues people have.
Conference Participation
- Beagleboard maintains a list of conferences as well as what was presented here. Slideshows
- Typically the conferences have to do with embedded Linux applications and the talks are given by various people in the Beagleboard community.
- Some of the conferences they have presentations at are:
- Embedded Linux Conference
- Maker Faire Bay Area
- SCALE
Community Architecture
- irc://irc.freenode.net/#beagle
- Source Code
- Forums
- Documentation
- Project Website
- Provides a kernel for BeagleBoard and BeagleBone devices
- Repository is large enough that it defies analysis
- Encorporates the Linux kernel
- Large number of contributors as a result, but few pull requests for the repository itself
- This repository's main differences are the BeagleBone specific drivers, etc
- Documentation for submitting patches is from the original Linux kernel
- Uses upstream changes, but non-upstream contributions must be BeagleBone-specific
- Hierarchical, one component of mainline Linux development
Callaway Coefficient of Fail
- Hard to apply to OSHW projects as much of the code written specifically for the project are spread throughout forks of other projects.
- Source Control
- Public (Github +0)
- Webviewer (Github +0)
- Source control tool (Git +0)
- Communication
- Announce releases (Newsletter, Github +0)
- Bug tracker (Github +0)
- Website (beaglebone.org +0)
Bus Test
- The GitHub organization only has 4 people on it. Fail.
Technology/Product
Beaglebone Boards
- Beagleboardorg has created several "boards" that are typically used in embedded Linux applications.
- Their current most popular board is the BeagleBone Black which is based off of an ARM chipset and runs Linux.
- The BeagleBone Black can be expanded by things called "Capes" which are attachments that can provide various additional functionality.
- Their older boards are the BeagleBoard, Beagleboard XM, and the BeagleBone.
- Over the years due to embedded technology getting better, their products have gotten cheaper and more powerful.
Social media