Profile: BeagleBoard Organization

Authors

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

We chose the Beaglebone organization as lots of us have used either one of their products or a similar product like the Raspberry Pi. It's a really cool company that has lots of potential for helping people get really cool embedded projects off the ground.

Organizational Details

  • Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity? Yes
  • What type? Texas Instruments is a Publically Trading Corporation
  • When was it founded? Originally founded as Geophysical Service Incorporated (1930) Founded as Texas Instruments (1951)
  • By whom?
    • GSI Founders:
      • John Clarence Karcher
      • Eugene McDermott
    • TI Founders:
      • Cecil H. Green
      • J. Erik Jonsson
      • Eugene McDermott
      • Patrick E. Haggerly
  • Original founder(s) still active? All the founders are dead
  • Publicly Traded? Since when? IPO: Too old to find information Current Price $56.535
  • Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products? Lots of acquisitions
  • as the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones? TI Invests more than $80M in University Research Projects
  • Number of employees? 34,759 Employees as of 2012
  • Where is HQ? HQ in Dallas Texas
  • Does it have any other offices or locations? Locations Worldwide
  • Website? ti.com
  • Wikipedia? Texas Instruments Wikipedia
  • Does your organization file any annual reports? TI Annual Reports

Communications

Social media

  • Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

Communications channels

  • What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public?
  • Beagleboard has a blog that they have some announcements on as well as showing cool new projects.
  • Beagleboard has a few mailing lists and forums.
  • They also operate a video tutorial website for common issues people have.

Conference Participation

  • Beagleboard maintains a list of conferences as well as [what was presented here][Slideshows].
  • Typically the conferences have to do with embedded Linux applications and the talks are given by various people in the Beagleboard community.
  • Some of the conferences they have presentations at are:

Slideshows

Community Architecture

  • IRC
  • Source Code
  • Forums
  • Documentation
  • Project Website
  • Provides a kernel for BeagleBoard and BeagleBone devices
  • Repository is large enough that it defies analysis
  • Encorporates the Linux kernel
  • Large number of contributors as a result, but few pull requests for the repository itself
  • This repository's main differences are the BeagleBone specific drivers, etc
  • Documentation for submitting patches is from the original Linux kernel
    • Uses upstream changes, but non-upstream contributions must be BeagleBone-specific
  • Hierarchical, one component of mainline Linux development

Callaway Coefficient of Fail

  • Hard to apply to open hardware projects as much of the code written specifically for the project are spread throughout forks of other projects.
  • Source Control
    • Public (Github +0)
    • Webviewer (Github +0)
    • Source control tool (Git +0)
  • Communication
    • Announce releases (Newsletter, Github +0)
    • Bug tracker (Github +0)
    • Website (beaglebone.org +0)

Bus Test

  • The GitHub organization only has 4 people on it. Fail.

Technology/Product

Beaglebone Boards

  • Beagleboardorg has created several "boards" that are typically used in embedded Linux applications.
  • Their current most popular board is the BeagleBone Black which is based off of an ARM chipset and runs Linux.
  • The BeagleBone Black can be expanded by things called "Capes" which are attachments that can provide various additional functionality.
  • Their older boards are the BeagleBoard, Beagleboard XM, and the BeagleBone.
  • Over the years due to embedded technology getting better, their products have gotten cheaper and more powerful.