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All About Beagle Board HackChat Transcript Pt.2

A event log for All About BeagleBoard

We'll be talking about BeagleBoard projects, communities, and hacks!

shulie-tornelShulie Tornel 10/13/2017 at 20:540 Comments

Jason Kridner @AdityaPrakash23 I can clearly say yes because you say "very basic". The big question is how basic is basic. A BeagleBone can do face recognition using the OpenCV demo code (unoptimized) at about 5-10 frames per second. Lots of room to optimize, but that is probably a reasonable proxy for the type of ML algorithms that you'd run. Running a neural net algorithm doesn't have to be crazy CPU intensive, but you have to look at how many nodes you need. Cloud training is clearly making things much easier.

Seth I see labor as a major, small-time effort in the expensive range. I have tried backing US mfg. but prices have soared. I can tell, esp. in my state. Louisiana has been an oil field marketplace. I am sure you have oil field related markets for embedded systems.

Shayna From Jacob : "The barrier of entry for PRU development seems pretty steep, any recommendations on getting started with PRU development?"

Jason Kridner @Seth lots of factors to roll in this discussion. I think the fact that we can make PocketBeagle in the US cost-effectively such that everyone in the chain gets a bit of profit and not selling as a loss-leader is a pretty big statement.

Seth yep!

AdityaPrakash23 @Jason Kridner So a basic neural net might work?

Jason Kridner yeah. As far as starting with PRU... My blinky LED example is at https://gist.github.com/jadonk/2ecf864e1b3f250bad82c0eae12b7b64 it uses the remote-proc stuff rather than UIO. I think it is pretty easy, but I know it really needs to be even easier.

Seth I get so "up and at 'em" with USA mfg. These days, it is sort of a touchy subject. So, back to the bone!

Jason Kridner @Chris Gammell did you catch that? :-D anyway, botspeak is a beginning-user's assembly language.

Shayna From @Sai Yamanoor : "Is it possible to program the PRU on the Beagle in an Arduino like environment? I learned about PRUduino. WOuld I be able to use third party libraries as-is or do I have to port them to use it?"

akqwy "Getting to PRU"

Jason Kridner I tried to gather some starting stuff at bbb.io/pru, but it is still a bit heavy.

Soul_Est @Seth I read you on that. Schiit Audio pulled it off but it really depends on the product. As you said back to it.

Seth Yep.

Jason Kridner my next plan is to create a botspeak interpreter as a kernel service, unlike the python attempt done by previous GSoC student. then, you can simply "cat" high-level assembly into a socket to get code for the PRU. nd then I'll create a little Firmata daemon for it. What's important to me is to make something that is easy to get started, but then is really practical for making a real product.

zakqwy "Don't be a PRUde -- BBB programming with Chris" sorry I'll stop

Jason Kridner Something I think I kinda missed the mark a bit still on BoneScript.

Seth So Jason, I have been on the google groups and on the #beagle on IRC. I have been overwhelmed by the support of the products produced by the beagleBoard.org people.

Garrett Mace And you start the processing with a marble rolling down a ramp turning on a fan that blows a USB drive into a port

Seth Oh yea...are you still going to produce BoneScript more?

Jason Kridner @Seth in a good way?

Seth Yea.

Jason Kridner @Seth yes, I'll still do BoneScript updates....

Seth In a good way...I have had all sorts of assistance, even when I did not deserve it.

Jason Kridner though I've floated the idea in small circles to make the RPC-server an installable rather than pre-installed component.I think JavaScript is a great development language (/me ducks), but most Beagle users never really go down that path. I need to do things the Beagle community loves. 

Garrett Mace I'm not against Javascript. I even use it for ESP8266 stuff

Jason Kridner For @Sai Yamanoor , I think that Firmata covers a lot of Arduino use cases....  I'd love to have a full Arduino-style library for the PRUs and the StarterWare stuff provides a good starting point....

Soul_Est @zakqwy it's PRU-dent to have more Bone-s for your audience. They made Beagle-lible though.

Shayna Just a few more Q's before open discussion ('til @Jason Kridner 's gotta hop on a plane) Another from @Sai Yamanoor : "When can I expect to be able to use the bonescript's GPIO capabilities on the Pocket Beagle?"

Frank Buss  I think Python is better for hardware control, e.g. ask our MicroPython expert @Radomir Dopieralski

Seth I will try but I am very inexperienced for now.

Jason Kridner  *sigh* Getting BoneScript working cleanly on PocketBeagle always feels a week away for me. Bug me a couple more times and I'll just do it to stop you from bugging me. :-)

Garrett Mace @Soul_Est there's that sharp pain in my head again

Seth Python is good. I enjoy typing software in python. Yea boy! Bug him! We need it.

Jason Kridner It really isn't much, just that there's a bunch of other documentation to create too.

Shayna From @Soul_Est : "To follow-up on Avner's question, will standard BeagleBones and PocketBeagle see a more energy efficient ARMv7 or ARMv8 CPU coupled with an equally efficient SGX GPU sometime in the future?"

Jason Kridner I'm very interested in ways we can take what we have on BeagleBoard-X15 and put it into a BeagleBone-like product. Contributions welcome. Some progress is made, but I've probably already said too much.

Seth I got one last question for this group. Does anyone use the Motor Bridge Cape for the BBB? Sorry. I like motors and electromechanical mowers.

Jason Kridner @Seth GHI and Embest are both working on revitalizing the Cape offerings, including motor drivers. Tindie also brought back the Beagle store.

Seth Cool. I will look into those Capes when they come out.

Shayna Last but not least from @Feed N Tweet : "If I wanted to drop Linux, what SDK do you recommend to program the ARM AM3358 natively?" StarterWare is the most logical place to grab a bare-metal programming library. Also, there's a ton of peripheral support in u-boot and they actually have some framework for adding programs that use that infrastructure. StarterWare is a TI software library and u-boot is an open source bootloader. both are technically open source. there are a lot of great RTOSes out there, proprietary and not.  QNX, etc.  here's also other great operating systems, like FreeBSD/OpenBSD. I just like the collaborative nature of Linux. pretty amazing all the code that gets managed in there.  I mean, why use stuff like MRAA when most sensors already have Linux drivers?!? 

specialed08 Gentoo?

Jason Kridner Gentoo is typically on Linux, though it'll run on others.... not really bare-metal. it is more about managing userspace.

Garrett Mace Yeah i've had surprising good luck with devicetree stuff lately. Lot of people working on the same problem. The 1% who need bare metal performance are also probably capable of doing the necessary work

Shayna Thanks so much for joining us and being generous with your time @Jason Kridner ( & beagleboard.org friends )

Jason Kridner k, I better run. hope this was useful. hope I don't see my words twisted too much later. ;-D

Shayna Happy to see everyone's excitement! You can find more BeagleBone projects to follow on Hackaday.io https://hackaday.io/list/3562-beaglebone-projects

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