[oe] FYI: Snowball (new low-cost board similar to beagle/panda)

[Eric Bénard]

On 19/06/2011 11:15, Petr Štetiar wrote:
> Eric Bénard<eric at eukrea.com>  [2011-06-18 09:20:54]:
>
>> it was announced on linux devices :
>> http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Calao-Systems-Snowball/ but as you
>> can see on their "community" site there are not much news since this date :
>> http://www.igloocommunity.org/
>
> I wonder, if that SOC used on this board is going to be as "easily" sourceable
> as it's the Omap4 on Pandaboard. Or it's meant to be sourced in the huge
> quantities only also?
>
OMAP4 is actually not easily sourceable, TI's web site says :
"This product is intended for high-volume wireless OEMs and ODMs and is not 
available through distributors."

>> If you want to pay for an "open" board to become a "free" beta tester for
>> an other phone/tablet cpu manufacturer you can also wait for
>> http://www.origenboard.org/
>
> Ditto.
>
> And I sometimes wonder, which company is going to trademark some of the
> buzzwords around the "free/open/community" first or even patent some kind of
> "free/open/community" work flow :-)
>
>> Next one in the list may be using an iMX6 from Freescale (in the page, this
>> one is said to also target industrial applications and not only
>> phones/tablets) :
>> http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?code=IMX6X_SERIES
>> which will surely have its equivalent of the i.MX53's QSB :
>> http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=IMX53QSB
>
> Good to know, I was wondering last week, what is that Loco board in the Linux
> kernel tree :-)
>
loco is qsb here again it's not clear why they chose loco for the board name 
in the kernel and qsb for the product name on the shelf ...

Eric