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

Installing software and tools on a Windows 7 PC


The BeagleBoard is fast by embedded standards and it will give your embedded system a run for its money, but it is not designed for some complicated tasks, such as compiling piles of source code to get an executable Linux kernel. Therefore, the widely-accepted practice for embedded system development is to develop and build software on a powerful desktop PC system (host PC) and then transfer the resulting executable software to the target system (which is the BeagleBoard in this book).

Target and host PC systems

Compared to the target embedded system, the host PC usually has a much more powerful CPU and huge memory. In theory, you can write your code and compile them at your target hardware, the BeagleBoard. This approach is called native complier, as you have a compiler installed at the BeagleBoard to build your software. However, compiling is time and resource consuming, especially when you are developing large software. It is not a reasonable...