[lug] Call for speakers - BLUG 2014

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Tue, 2014-01-07 at 11:57 -0700, William D. Knoche wrote:
> In fact it would be really helpful to have a comprehensive comparison of 
> each with notes about features, development toolsets, issues, etc.
> Anyone already done this?

Well, I have both the BeagleBoard (not BeagleBone) and RPi.  I switched
to the Pi purely for selfish reasons - the guy doing the software for
the BeagleBoard was less than friendly in his interactions with some of
the community and generally so terse in his explanations as to be less
than helpful.  I won't go so far to say he was rude, but I found it
off-putting. The RPi community was much more inviting.  Both are
annoying with their binary blobs for video support, but I've learned to
live with that.  I found it a little easier to find the canonical
sources for the kernel, firmware, etc for the Pi though if you follow
Robert Nelson on the Beagle lists you'll find his repositories easy to
work with.

I'm working on a project called PiBox.  There is the PiBox Development
Platform which is a general purpose custom build/distribution
(Crosstool-NG/BusyBox/Buildroot/etc).  From that I've built the PiBox
Media Server which I will run in my R-Pod trailer when we go camping.
It lets me plug in an USB-connected SD card and stream it to my android
devices.  It also provides a USB connected camera that I can use to
stream to web browsers - I'll use this as a rear-view camera when we
pull the trailer and may extend it for 360-degree viewing around the
trailer.  It will (eventually) also include environmental sensors
support and an on-board ~2" TFT touchscreen display to for display and
control.  A web interface provides the camera streaming and network
setup, the latter only from a local browser (re: via the HDMI connected
to the Pi).  My goal with using a custom distribution is to strip out
non-essential components to reduce the cost of the SD card along with SD
wear and hold down memory usage to improve performance.

Later I'll roll out the PiBox Media Player with XBMC, full codec support
and some display mechanism (probably just a microDLP projector bought
off the shelf that connects via the HDMI).  I recently found a cheap
projector mechanism that uses a simple Fresnel lens and shoebox that
I'll probably build first.  The goal is to play movies from the Media
Server through the Media Player projected onto the side of my trailer.
We have an attached, enclosed canopy inside which we'll watch the movies
ala a drive-in theater.  I'll use Bluetooth audio to support multiple
headphones.

I'm looking into integrating things like WifiDirect to ease
configuration, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for a sensor network and
possibly (long term, cuz I'm not a hardware guy) roll out a custom USB
hub connected to the GPIO pins specifically targeted at small-trailer
owners.

All of this is custom - I roll my own cross toolchain, build my own
kernel and root file system and customize the lot with opkgs.  You'd be
surprised how much you learn if you try to do the whole thing yourself.

Anyway, that's just my little project(s).

-- 
Michael J. Hammel <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org>