BeagleBoard.org Foundation

Mentors: Student: Dhruva Gole

<p>As given on the <a href="https://learn.bela.io/get-started-guide/say-hello-to-bela/#what-is-bela" target="_blank">official website</a>, Bela is a hardware and software system for creating beautiful interaction with sensors and sound. Bela consists of a Bela cape on top of a BeagleBone Black computer (uptil now). The idea is to enable smooth transition of the associated software to the BBAI and future TI chips.</p>

Mentors: Student: Archisman Dey

<p>Building upon the work done in GSoC 2020 to make programming the PRU easier for beginners, this project aims to add tests, features, and more compatibility for simpPRU, the simple Python-like language that compiles to PRU C and runs natively on the PRU. More specifically, I am planning to add support for the BeagleBone Blue, add unit tests for every language feature, add hexadecimal support for ints, add support for modulo and bitshift operators, support for a new char/uint8 data type, support for a simple array structure, adding a more flexible for loop, and adding the ability to send more complex data in the form of strings through rpmsg and receive them in simppru-console. I will also improve the error handling in the parser and fix known issues in simpPRU. This will make the overall language more robust and complete, which will help beginners learning to use the PRU or experienced users prototyping something on the PRU.</p>

Mentors: Student: Omkar Bhilare

<h3>Introduction</h3> <ul> <li>The BeagleWire is an FPGA development platform that has been designed for use with BeagleBone boards. BeagleWire is a cape on which there is an FPGA device (Lattice iCE40HX). The software support for BeagleWire is still in the development phase. </li> <li>In this project, I'm developing and testing the existing software support of Beaglewire. The known primary issue in Beaglewire is the interface between 32MB SDRAM and ICE40HX4K. For this Solution, I'm going to try options like LiteDRAM(a small footprint and configurable DRAM core). </li> </ul> <h3>Testing and Improvement of Subsystem Like I2C, SPI, PWM, UART</h3> <ul> <li>In this project I'm going to test all the subsystems like I2C, SPI, PWM, UART in Hardware and the primary goal will be to debug the issues related to them and fix them accordingly. Along with the driver code ready to use solutions will be added in software support.</li> </ul> <h3>Others</h3> <ul> <li>There are current Issues open on BeagleWire Repository, These will be solved during this project.</li> <li>More PMODs will be interfaced with the BeagleWire.</li> <li>Increase the Documentation and also add getting started guide for BeagleWire.</li> </ul>

Mentors: Student: Jakub Duchniewicz

<p>Since BeagleBoards are heterogeneous platforms, why not use them to their full extent? Apparently for the time being the GPU block lies mostly useless and cannot assist with any computations due to non-technical reasons. Normally, OpenCL would be used for accelerating on the GPU, but taking the limitations discussed above it is impossible, yet there is another way! GPGPU acceleration with OpenGLES.</p> <p>The GPU accelerators from PowerVR (series SGX500) are available in all BB's and a unified acceleration framework for them is the topic of this proposal. The targeted version of OpenGL ES is 2.0, but extending it to the future versions will not be a problem from a technical point of view as the newer versions are backwards compatible. The API of the library will allow for performing various mathematical operations, and will return the results to the user in the same format they input the data in.</p> <p>Apart from the library, the project will explore the performance gains when using the GPU (compared to the CPU) and provide the user with guidelines on when it is feasible to put the BB's GPU accelerator to use and when to refrain from it.</p>

Mentors: Student: Shreyas Swanand Atre

<p><strong>Beagle-Config</strong> is a tool-set, that aims to provide the functionality to make the most common low-level configuration changes in beagle devices easily and providing a terminal UI to do the same as well as a host-side application for ICS and many one-click enable features for seamless user experience.</p> <ul> <li>Brings down the steep curve and enables anybody to configure their beagle device</li> <li>Makes beagle devices more friendly </li> <li>More configurations can be added at any point in the time</li> <li>Safer than using scripts from a non-trusted source</li> </ul>