dc7 - 1.0
DebConf7
| Speakers | |
|---|---|
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Wookey |
| Schedule | |
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| Day | 15 |
| Room | Upper Talk Room |
| Start time | 16:00 |
| Duration | 00:15 |
| Info | |
| ID | 108 |
| Event type | Lightning talk |
| Track | DebConf |
| Language | English |
| Feedback | |
|---|---|
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Balloon Open Hardware Board & Licence
Come and see what you might be able to do with it.
The Balloon3 is an open hardware ARM development board designed for educational and industrial use integrated into products. The FPGA makes it particularly interesting as that can do some quite heavy lifting. The project has produced a general-purpose hardware licence which recognises the fact that hardware sales have legal requirments on designers, manufacturers, distributors and users. This is a short introduction to the licence, the board and the project.
The Balloon project has been running since 2002 and is currently producing its 3rd generation boards. It was inspired by the TU Delft LART board and follows the same open hardware policy - everything needed to make one is published online and anyone can manufacture the board. A new general -purpose Balloon Open Hardware Licence has been developed to distinguish between designers, manufacturers and users, giving each group the rights and legal protections they need. This is different from software, where designers and manufacturers are always the same people.
The current (Balloon3) board is designed to be manfacturable in various forms - single sided PCB, with 1 million gate FPGA (high performance and power), or CPLD (low power) and so on. It is based on the (Arm) Intel PXA270 SOC and thus includes CF/PCMCIA, USB host, client and OTG, I2C, Audio, LCD, touchscreen, Camera, Gneral purpose IO, Expansion bus, 16-bit simple 'samosa' bus, serial.
The project has been sponsored by Cambridge University Engineering department, Toby Churchill Ltd, and Aleph One, and is used in the Cambridge/MIT MDP project, as a teaching aid for computing, robotics, assembler, control systems. They have produced a range of add-on boards for the purpose interconnected using I2C. Toby Churchill use it as the base of a medical aid - a speech synthesiser for people who can't speak.
The development of Balloon has spun off a few useful bits of software: the YAFFS filesystem for NAND flash (now in the kernel), and bflash - JTAG programming software that understands multiple JTAG chains.
A small company (Balloonz) has been set up to manage the production and co-ordinate development, for which I am now working. We are very keen to hear from people who have cool ideas about how to use balloons.