Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas and TI to Host Technical SpeedWays on the New BeagleBoard-xM

Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, a distributor of electronics equipment and a business region of Avnet, Inc., signed its association with Texas Instruments (News - Alert) to conduct a series of SpeedWay technical seminars on the new open source community BeagleBoard-xM Texas Instruments based development platform.

BeagleBoard-xM is an open hardware design that improves upon the laptop-like performance and expandability, featuring TI's ARM (News - Alert) microprocessor-based EZ Software Development Kit (EZ SDK). The BeagleBoard-xM delivers 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 performance and extra memory with 512MB of low-power DDR RAM (News - Alert).

"BeagleBoard-xM and TI's EZ SDK are great tools to jumpstart Linux development on TI's popular ARM microprocessors," John Weber, applications engineering manager at Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas said in a press release.

"Avnet's technical team created this training with a strong focus on the popular, affordable BeagleBoard-xM. This course eliminates the learning curve by detailing the installation process all the way to application development with TI's EZ SDK," Weber added.

Planned at ten different locations throughout America, this daylong technical seminar series is said to feature presentations and hands-on labs demonstrating TI's DaVinci digital media processors, C6000 digital signal processors, DSP + ARM processors and ARM microprocessors. Technical experts from both Avnet and TI will teach design engineers how to take full advantage of the latest release of the popular BeagleBoard development platform.

"TI is continually seeking ways to make embedded development easier," Jake Alamat, director, marketing, ARM microprocessors, TI said in a statement.

 "By teaming up with Avnet, embedded developers can learn Linux programming by utilizing the popular open source community platform, BeagleBoard-xM, along with TI's EZ SDK. It's a great way to springboard development into other areas of embedded hardware design," Alamat added.

Customers who wish to attend the seminars can register at a cost of $199, said the company. As part of the attendance fee, attendees will receive the BeagleBoard-xM, along with an accessory kit, which includes a 5V, 6A power supply, 4GB SD card, SD card reader and USB to serial adapter.

Avnet Memec, a division of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, recently signed a distribution agreement with Bluegiga Technologies (News - Alert), Inc., a manufacturer of Bluetooth-based wireless module and access device products, including new Bluetooth 4.0 low-energy offerings.