Why I like building with modular Linux Gadgets

With all the talk about iPhone vs. Android wars, it's easy to forget that Linux was once discussed as a popular platform for rapid prototyping gadget development. The more projects I do with the BeagleBoard, the more emails I seem to get from fellow engineers and programmers - many who work at embedded systems companies around the Boston, New York, (and California).

Oddly enough, a lot of programmers still favor Linux development over iPhone apps because of how many programming languages you have available, and the fact that you don't have to load up massive amounts of dev API's to start hacking, you can just pick it up with gcc or Perl and run. And Linux gadgets in general are a little different from Android too, because while Android focuses more on the GUI and user interface and experience, Linux is much lower level, and therefore tends to be more useful for industrial design, control, and engineering applications like sensor and motor control and industrial automation.


I suppose you could say Android is "consumer" focused, and Linux is "industrial" focused.


Anyway, I've been programming a number of apps for folks who have asked for help recently, and I've been learning a lot about the design process of building modular gadgets with the BeagleBoard from TI, and the BeagleTouch and BeagleJuice from Liquidware.

The first thing I've realized is that having raw exposed digital IO pins is a life-saver. I use these to hack in switches and LED's without having to completely reverse engineer schematics and pin diagrams. Literally I can just solder into the general purpose IO and I'm off and running. Alternatively, I use the Arduino to wire in a sensor like the Compass Sensor or Temp Sensor or Gyroscopic Sensor, and then plug it into the USB port (I'll blog about this soon).

Practically speaking, being able to disassemble the device and reassemble it on the fly in a modular way, is a pretty useful skill in making gadget or hardware demos. This is because I can change the form factor around on the fly. I was in a meeting earlier today (which inspired me to write this article), when the project manager guy asked how hard it would be to turn the Gadget Pack handheld into a terminal with a keyboard... so I unscrewed the demo and within 60 seconds, had something that looked like this:

Then, one of the engineers said, "yeah, that's cool, but we really ought to have an on-screen keyboard." So I clicked around twice, and using the fact that it's a touchscreen, I loaded up the Linux onscreen keyboard app that Will converted for the Beagle Gadget Pack, and then turned it into this:

That's pretty powerful, because it's *real time prototyping* not just rapid prototyping. As in, it happened instantly, almost as fast as it took for someone to finish the sentence, it was done. I've observed that "business guys" and "customers" that embedded design companies build devices for often like to change their mind in the middle of the project as they learn more about what they're trying to build, or the aesthetics, or design or interface needs. It's quite expensive to a project to have to re-engineer the whole thing from scratch every time the form factor needs to be changed. Making something 100% modular makes changes like this really fast. Plus, I've pretty much found a way to cut out the part of the prototyping process that involves making a "non-functional prototype" and just jumped right into making a functional prototype...

So I've been living with the Open SciCal and the Gadget Pack for 2.5 weeks now, and so far I've showed it to half a dozen folks, and gotten 3 assignments to build custom gadgets using the platform. I'm not going to become a millionaire by any means, but I'm at least getting paid to do what I love doing... which is hacking open source hardware into gadgets, and if you had asked me 3 years ago when I started this blog if that would ever be a possibility, I would have said fat chance...

So anyway, thanks to Will and Chris, Mike and Justin, and Matt, John for all the support and help along the way... and here's to some happy hacking over the next few days and very very late nights as I work on my top secret project...


"Project C".


Dun dun dun....


:-)