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 demonst ...

development platform based on the

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. It is one of the top 10 semiconductor companies worldwide based on sales volume. The company's focus is on developing analog ...

OMAP4430

system on a chip A system on a chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit that combines most or all key components of a computer or Electronics, electronic system onto a single microchip. Typically, an SoC includes a central processing unit (CPU) with computer memory, ...

(SoC). The board has been available to the public at the subsidized price of

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

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: * O ...

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, video decoding, decoding, associated image processing and DirectX, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and ...

SGX540

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

, 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 is a JEDEC standard (JESD79-2); first published in September 2003. DDR2 succeed ...

. 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 (SD) is a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of portable consumer electronics, including dig ...

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 li ...

connectivity. Its size is slightly larger than the ETX/ XTX Computer form factor at . The board can output video signals via DVI and

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary digital interface used to transmit high-quality video and audio signals between devices. It is commonly used to connect devices such as televisions, computer monitors, projectors, gam ...

interfaces. It also has 3.5 mm audio connectors. It has two

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

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 also act as a host, allowing other USB devices, such as USB flash drives, digital cameras, mice or keyb ...

port, supporting USB 2.0.

Operating systems

The device runs the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

, 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 software, open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and Matchstick TV, dongles designed by Mozilla and exte ...

user environment. Optimised versions of Android and

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

are available from the

Linaro Linaro Limited 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 se ...

Foundation.

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

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system, security-focused, free software, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by fork (software development), forking NetBSD ...

supports PandaBoard.

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

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 QNX ( or ) is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. The product was originally developed in the early 1980s by Canadian company Quantum Software Systems, founded March 30, 1980, and l ...

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-accelerate ...

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 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

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, server (computing), servers and embedded ...

, 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.

Similar products

Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi ( ) is a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in collaboration with Broadcom Inc., Broadcom. To commercialize the product and support its growing demand, the ...

Single-board computer using an older ARM11 core with a more powerful GPU featuring 1080p hardware accelerated video decoding of H.264, significantly cheaper. *

Cotton Candy Cotton candy, also known as candy floss (candyfloss) and fairy floss, is a spun sugar confection that resembles cotton. It is made by heating and liquefying sugar, and spinning it centrifugally through minute holes, causing it to rapidly cool ...

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. *

CuBox CuBox and CuBox-i are series of small and fanless nettop-class computers manufactured by the Israeli company SolidRun Ltd. They are all cube-shaped and sized at approximately 2 × 2 × 2 inches (5 cm) and weigh 91 grams (0.2 lb, or 3 ...

- Low-power Marvell ARM desktop/nettop computer *

BeagleBoard The BeagleBoard is a low-power open-source single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key and Newark element14. The BeagleBoard was also designed with open source software development in mind, and as a way of de ...

- Similar to PandaBoard but using OMAP3530 or OMAP3730, JTAG connector and one of the expansion connectors is the same. ** BeagleBone - A Sitara-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