The PandaBoard was a low-power

single-board computer A single-board computer (SBC) is a complete computer built on a single circuit board, with microprocessor(s), memory, input/output (I/O) and other features required of a functional computer. Single-board computers are commonly made as demonstrat ...

development platform based on the

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...

OMAP4430

system on a chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memor ...

(SoC). The board has been available to the public at the subsidized price of US$174 since 27 October 2010. It is a community supported development platform. The PandaBoard ES is a newer version based on the OMAP4460 SoC, with the CPU and GPU running at higher clock rates. Like its predecessor, it is a community supported development platform.

Features

The OMAP4430 SoC on the PandaBoard features a dual-core 1 GHz

ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore is a 32-bit multi-core processor that provides up to 4 cache-coherent cores, each implementing the ARM v7 architecture instruction set. It was introduced in 2007. Features Key features of the Cortex-A9 core are: * ...

CPU, a 304 MHz

PowerVR PowerVR is a division of Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) that develops hardware and software for 2D and 3D rendering, and for video encoding, decoding, associated image processing and DirectX, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and OpenCL accel ...

SGX540

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

, IVA3 multimedia hardware accelerator with a programmable DSP, and 1 GiB of

DDR2 SDRAM Double Data Rate 2 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR2 SDRAM) is a double data rate (DDR) synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) interface. It superseded the original DDR SDRAM specification, and was itself superseded by DDR ...

. The PandaBoard ES uses a newer SoC, with a dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU and 384 MHz GPU. Primary persistent storage is via an

SD Card Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...

slot allowing SDHC cards up to 32 GB to be used. The board includes wired 10/100 Ethernet as well as wireless Ethernet and

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

connectivity. Its size is slightly larger than the ETX/

XTX XTX is a computer-on-module (COM) standard for x86-based embedded devices. XTX adds PCI-Express, SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, ...

Computer form factor at . The board can output video signals via

DVI Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source, such as a video display controller, to a display device, such as a comp ...

and

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a display controlle ...

interfaces. It also has 3.5 mm audio connectors. It has two USB host ports and one

USB On-The-Go USB On-The-Go (USB OTG or just OTG) is a specification first used in late 2001 that allows USB devices, such as tablets or smartphones, to act as a host, allowing other USB devices, such as USB flash drives, digital cameras, mouse or keyboa ...

port, supporting USB 2.0.

Operating systems

The device runs the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

, with either traditional distributions or the Android or Mozilla

Firefox OS Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and dongles designed by Mozilla and external contributors. It is based on the ...

user environment. Optimised versions of Android and

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

are available from the

Linaro Linaro is an engineering organization that works on free and open-source software such as the Linux kernel, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), QEMU, power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces for the ARM family of instruction sets and i ...

Foundation.

has selected the PandaBoard to be one of the hardware platforms they support with monthly build images.

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project e ...

supports PandaBoard.

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

added PandaBoard support in August 2012. The Genode Operating System Framework added support in release 12.05 (May 2012). A version of is actively developed. QNX Neutrino 6.5.0 SP1 and 6.6.0 have Board Support Packages for the PandaBoard and PandaBoard ES.

Graphics

The PandaBoard has an integrated SGX540 graphics processor and provides 1080p HDMI output. This GPU supports

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accele ...

2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1,

OpenVG OpenVG is an API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. Its primary platforms are mobile phones, gaming & media consoles and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to help manufacturers create more attractive user interfac ...

1.1 and EGL 1.3. The situation for Linux - x11 utilizing hardware floating point libraries is PowerVR's SGX540 GPU hardware is unusable without a GPU driver. Furthermore, PowerVR will not release documentation so that an open source driver could be produced. This all adds up to the GPU hardware being unavailable, so the above-mentioned features of course will not function. To be perfectly clear, a Pandaboard es will not play any low quality video, so 1080p output via the HDMI is certainly and proven not possible. Due to PowerVR making the driver unavailable, and withholding the documentation on the GPU hardware, the only alternative is the difficult and inefficient reverse engineering method to develop a GPU driver. An effort was started in July 2012, but as of June 2013 there is no visible progress. The Linaro Linux project had a Linux x11 software floating point GPU driver available, but all current efforts with ARM Linux seem to be utilizing the hardware floating point libraries. The soft/hard floating point systems are not compatible.

Clock

The PandaBoard has a

real-time clock A real-time clock (RTC) is an electronic device (most often in the form of an integrated circuit) that measures the passage of time. Although the term often refers to the devices in personal computers, servers and embedded systems, RTCs are pr ...

, but it does not have a battery to save the time when power is removed. As an alternative, a software clock can set the clock time at bootup based on the time of the last modification to the file system so that times stored in files will be more reasonable. NTP can set the correct date and time if the PandaBoard has network access to an NTP server.

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is a single-board computer on stick. * Hawk Board Low power OMAP SBC with SATA & VGA out. * Gumstix Overo COMs use the OMAP3503 or the OMAP3530 to provide a full product line of BeagleBoard-compatible products for hobbyist, robotic and commercial use. *

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- Low-power Marvell ARM desktop/nettop computer * BeagleBoard - Similar to PandaBoard but using OMAP3530 or OMAP3730, JTAG connector and one of the expansion connectors is the same. ** BeagleBone - A

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-based development board

Expansion boards

BeadaFrame 7" LCD display kit ** 7" 800x480 TFT LCD screen ** PWM Backlight control ** Resistive touch screen ** RTC time keeper ** Plastic frame

References

{{Single-board computer Texas Instruments hardware Embedded Linux Single-board computers Linux-based devices Open computers