Dog and Birds - Hawkboards and BeagleBoard

The HawkBoard costs about 1/2 the price of a BeagleBoard, only on special though. So I killed 2 birds with 1 stone and got 2 of them from Special Computing and 1 BeagleBoard from DigiKey.

They both used $30 delivery mechanisms - UPS Express Saver and USPS International Express. The postal service beat the courier by a day since the courier does not deliver to the remote areas every day.

Anyway everything is finally here and the hawkboard is the easiest to get started with since it has an on-board serial connector - no soldering needed. I got Ubuntu installed with this guide and the following modification:

1) Load the kernel using - bootp 0xc0700000 [ip]:uImage
2) Slight changes in bootline – added mem=128M
3) bootm from 0xc0700000
4) The global chmod 777 prevents you from using sudo. You need to chmod 4755 on /usr/bin/sudo and 440 on /etc/sudoers.
 
Otherwise ubuntu jaunty just works and I even have my favourite Python to play with on the tiny board. Nothing of this form factor has afforded me this pleasure in the past. Next step is to install some components of ROS on it and start building the LocalHawk - localized UAV version of the GlobalHawk.