Kridner of Beagleboard.org opens ARM Developer Day

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Jason Kridner

You can teach old dogs new technology tricks.

Jason Kridner, co-founder of Beagleboard.org, an Open Source technology organization, will be discussing new technology, specifically the software and hardware used in embedded computing, as the keynote speaker for RIT’s fourth annual ARM Developer Day.

The all-day event takes place from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, Jan. 31, at RIT. Registration check-in begins at 7:30 a.m. in RIT’s Center for Student Innovation, and Kridner’s keynote address follows at 8:30 a.m. in the same location. A full schedule of the hands-on workshops and locations is available.

The event is free and open to students, faculty and staff. Registration is required and can be done online.

Kridner, currently the open platforms technologist at Texas Instruments, founded BeagleBoard.org with co-worker Gerald Coley as a community focused on providing affordable, powerful, open hardware computers to learn about electronics and embedded systems. Its primary platform technology is the BeagleBoard, a general-purpose microprocessor that can be used to connect a variety of peripherals. Kridner’s presentation, “The Next Economy is Hardware Included,” focuses on the new product development landscape that includes low-cost, low-power ARM development boards, such as BeagleBone Black. These high-level operating systems provide Internet connectivity through a variety of interfaces and allow developers to decrease the time and cost to bring a potential product to market.

This is the fourth year RIT has hosted the ARM Developer Day program, and it has grown from a handful of students and national companies involved to more than 250 students and a dozen companies, said Adriana Becker-Gomez, lecturer in RIT’s computer engineering department.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for the students, it inspires them,” she said. “We bring in field engineers from companies such as Texas Instruments, Freescale, Cypress and mbed, and our students are able to talk to technical people about the microprocessors, and how they work, not sales people. These are hands-on sessions and they get to keep the boards, too.”

Participating companies are ARM, Texas Instruments, BeagleBoard.com, Freescale, Cypress Semiconductor, ST Micro, Atmel Inc., mbed, NXP Semiconductors, MathWorks, Raspberry Pi, Keil, Element14 and CadSoft EAGLE.