I'm trying to chose the ARM development board for education purpose. The goal is to learn how to run and play around with systems like Android (version 2.0 or higher),Linux, Windows CE. It must support touch-screen, Ethernet, USB host and device.
I've found many boards, the most interesting is Android6410. I've search Google and it seems that it is not very popular. Has anyone used it? Is it well documented? What about the support? How about the performance under Android?
I've also found some other development boards:
- http://www.friendlyarm.net/products/mini2440?lang=en - the most popular one but probably it is too slow for android 2.0.
- http://www.friendlyarm.net/products/mini6410?lang=en - the same CPU like Android6410 but it seems to be a new product so the support may be pretty bad
- http://beagleboard.org/ - quite interesting and popular but no touch-screen in standard version. The external ones are very expensive (twice as expensive as the board itself)
- http://pandaboard.org/ - very fast but also doesn't have standard touch-screen connector, no Windows CE support
Any hints will be appreciated.
Samsung has provided an android kernel, as well as a reasonably current "generic" linux kernel) that, amongst other Samsung SoCs, also supports the 6410. The Git repos are here:
https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/samsung
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/kgene/linux-samsung.git
These do provide smdk6410 defconfig targets.
You also need an odroid bootloader (uboot for 6410) to be able to flash new kernels onto the board and/or the SDcard it boots from, as Samsung uses a special "fastboot" utility for this purpose (very different from OMAP which just puts the kernel into a file).
I can't comment on the performance of the device compared to others, as I haven't run extensive benchmark tests or anything, sorry. You're right, it's way ahead of 2440; it's an ARM1136 CPU, so it'll end up somewhat slower than the Cortex-A chips from omap3/4 boards.