Beagle Core
Hello guys,
There is a new crowdfunding campaign which might be of some interest to you: "BeagleCore - 100% Open Source IoT device" (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beaglecore/beaglecore-100-open-source-iot-device/description)
This board claims to be "100 % Open Source": "We love Open Source almost as much as we love BeagleCore™ and and we strive to pay back to the open source community because we rely on the passion of each and every Open Source afficionado out there. All hardware schematics, PCB layout and the bill of materials will be free for you to download, modify and use."
What are your thoughts on that?
Does this really includes all the design files? Including the ones from the SoC?
LOL the video, it's a campaign for hardware or for a movie?
The video is really well done, I agree. :-D
As for your question, I can unfortunately only tell you what's written on their campaign's site. I hope they are determined to free hardware as this would help the free community a lot IMHO.
for those not using java-script the direct video link is here:
https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/projects/1946577/video-556107-h264_high.mp4
Its an ARM board, it has all the same problems most ARM boards have. https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
BeagleBone Black is actually quite good about freedom. Of all the ARM development boards out there, BBB is one of the only ones that you can reasonably run using entirely free software.
The only component on the "Beagle Core" (and BBB for that matter) that can't be run using free software is the HDMI chip... however you can disable that in the device tree, and especially for a board like this you probably don't need HDMI or video encoding. This seems like a great platform if you can get away with running it headless over a network or serial connection.
You could, for example, flash Libreboot onto a thinkpad using this device with only free software (though would probably be easier to do it with a regular BBB for that particular application).
From the link I provided: "However, the graphics accelerator (GPU) and the video decoding hardware for formats such as MPEG-2 are nonfunctional, because they require nonfree blobs to be installed into them. The workaround for these flaws is to do these jobs on the CPU with free software."
That sounds more significant than the loss of one port to run a fully libre set-up. Some may find this acceptable, others not so much.
Fair enough, it definitely is not for all purposes. Just pointing out that if you don't need graphics the board mentioned in the OP can be run totally libre.
the bbb looks great for running home servers with all libre software