Book Image

Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink

Book Image

Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink

Overview of this book

As an open source embedded single-board computer with many standard interfaces, Beagleboard is ideal for building embedded audio/video systems to realize your practical ideas. The challenge is how to design and implement a good digital processing algorithm on Beagleboard quickly and easily without intensive low-level coding. Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink is a practical, hands-on guide providing you with a number of clear, step-by-step exercises which will help you take advantage of the power of Beagleboard and give you a good grounding in rapid prototyping techniques for your audio/video applications. Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink looks at rapid prototyping and how to apply these techniques to your audio/video applications with Beagleboard quickly and painlessly without intensive manual low-level coding. It will take you through a number of clear, practical recipes that will help you to take advantage of both the Beagleboard hardware platform and Matlab/Simulink signal processing. We will also take a look at building S-function blocks that work as hardware drivers and interfaces for Matlab/Simulink. This gives you more freedom to explore the full range of advantages provided by Beagleboard. By the end of this book, you will have a clear idea about Beagleboard and Matlab/Simulink rapid prototyping as well as how to develop voice recognition systems, motion detection systems with I/O access, and serial communication for your own applications such as a smart home.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Rapid BeagleBoard Prototyping with MATLAB and Simulink
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Windows-based cross-compiler


Now we have the hardware for our rapid prototyping, we will need to develop software to make use of the capabilities of the hardware. Since compiling on a desktop PC is much faster than compiling on an embedded system, as a common approach in practice, we are editing, compiling, and building code on a Windows host PC to get ARM-compatible programs that will be running on the Linux BeagleBoard. The distinguishing feature of this approach is the cross-platform development: the executable program is built on an x86-Windows platform, but runs on a different ARM-Linux embedded system. In order to do this, you need a cross-platform toolchain with a cross-compiler for your BeagleBoard.

Note

A cross-compiler is able to create an executable program for a platform other than the one on which the compiler is running. In our scenario, the compiler runs on a Windows machine (usually with an x86 processor), but its outputs are executables for an ARM processor. A toolchain is...