Re: [beagleboard-gsoc] Re: Interested participant for GSoC 2013

[Aleks]

On 13.04.2013 01:39, Tom King wrote:
> Sounds like you have a good start on thinking about this...
>
> best to refine your ideas a bit and bounce things off of people here on the
> list...
>

Hi Tom, sorry for the late response

> now is the time for "discussion on ideas" so if you have specific questions
> related to what you are thinking post them here and we can try to help.

I'm currently thinking about the port of the arduino libraries, while
using the standard IDE in order to write code for the beagle board.

This means that firstly the core functions, like digitalWrite(),
pinMode(), digitalRead().

This means that the code should be cross-compiled for the ARM processor,
and loaded to the beagle board.

What I had in mind was to create a small daemon, which will run on the
beagle board GNU/Linux OS - let's call it beagleduino-daemon, which will
be responsible for listening to the IDE, catching the compiled code from
the IDE and running it on the beagle board.

This implies that there should be some method of relaying the compiled
binary to the beagle board itself, maybe making an extension to the
current arduino IDE, or calling up on some script that will copy the
.bin (compiled program) file via scp/ftp/w/e to the beagle board, and
tell the daemon to execute the new code.

The daemon will also need to know if the program stops, waits for an
interrupt (software interrupts / software pooling?).

How does this sound ?

> I don't know that a Beaglebone is a requirement as the xM is still current
> too, and it sounds like you have some ideas already to use MSP430 too...
>

I got confused as to the target of the idea, I though that the arduino
port should be targeted to the Beagle Bone only.


> Good Luck and let us know if there is anything more we can help you with
>
> Tom
>

Regards,
Aleks

[Jason Kridner]

On Friday, April 12, 2013 10:22:32 AM UTC-4, Aleksandar Lazarov wrote:

Good afternoon/evening to all,

My name is Aleksandar Lazarov, please call me Aleks, and I'm a third-year student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies in Skopje, Macedonia. I'm studying in the program Electronics, Radio Engineering and Signal Processing.

I'm interested in participating in this year's Google Summer of Code, more exactly, participate in the BeagleBoard community. Why ? Well, I consider myself to be a hardware hacker, and anything regarding Open Hardware and Open Software just makes my day.

I'm a member of the Free Software Macedonia NGO[1] and also a member of the only hackerspace in Macedonia - KIKA[2], where I'm the only hardware related guy there.

I have a good knowledge in the C and C++ programing languages, as I mostly write software for embedded devices (Arduino mostly). I'm a GNU/Linux user for almost 8 years now, and I'm familiar with Linux itself, the development of FLOSS software, and the GNU/Linux programing environment and it's setup (compiler, linker, debugger, Autotools, Make etc...). I'm also an Arduino user/maker, making electronics for it and programing it.

I've read up on the Ideas page, that having an Arduino-compatible library for Linux would be a nice idea, and even adding support for the BeagleBone to the Energia fork. I think that this is an excellent idea, and would love to work on it ! In our hackerspace, we have a BeagleBoard-Mx board, but not a BeagleBone, so I will need to find one. In the meanwhile, I'm going to clone the Energia repo, and play around with the code, try it out on a MSP430 board and see how it can be "hacked" for the BeagleBone.

Great.  Check out the 'userspace' fork at https://github.com/prpplague/Energia/tree/userspace.  It currently just performs printf's where it needs to do actual hardware interactions.  I put everything into a library and created a pkg-config and simple Makefile (that did .ino to .cpp conversion), but the Arduino folks didn't seem interested in having those changes pushed upstream.  I didn't do a super clean job of it either.  Anyway, you'll want to have some consideration of how you might build outside the IDE as well.  Rebasing that fork and starting to fill in the functionality would seem to be a good way to go to me.  Best to further coordinate with Dave Anders, since it is his fork.

 

Can anyone please be so kind to direct me on how should I proceed before the application period, what tasks do I need to complete in order for me to have a chance of acceptance in GSoC 2013 ?

Have you looked at the questionnaire at http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/beagle.  Some of our mentors are still needing a bit of encouragement to get engaged with the project, but I know they have been very excellent help in the past and will do so once they feel like you can be valuable to advance the projects.  Try to read up about what various people in the beagleboard.org community have done and engage them to see how you can best work with them (and me). 

 

Regards,
Aleks


[1] - http://slobodensoftver.org.mk/
[2] - http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/KIKA

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[Jason Kridner]

Start simple and expand.  Make sure you can scp/start/stop reliably before trying to do more complicated things like debug.  I don't even know where you'd hook anything like that into the Arduino IDE.  I'm not even really sure what you are talking about.  A simple 'exec' should return upon termination.  I would just use existing servers as much as possible, potentially even 'gdbserver'. 

 

> I don't know that a Beaglebone is a requirement as the xM is still current
> too, and it sounds like you have some ideas already to use MSP430 too...
>

I got confused as to the target of the idea, I though that the arduino
port should be targeted to the Beagle Bone only.

Ideally, you'd cover both BeagleBoard(-xM) and BeagleBone(Black).  I'd work closely with whatever mentors you can align with to make sure they are comfortable with your approach (as in which one to start with first).

[Aleks]

Hello Jason,

Sorry for the very late response. Thanks for the pointers that you gave
me. I incorporated the ideas in my proposal which is available at
https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/aleksmk/1

I've put a detailed description of my idea, as well as how I plan to
make it a reality.

I know that I'm submitting my proposal at a photo finish time, and hope
that it will hold up to the standards.

I wish all the students best of luck !

Cheers!
Aleks

[Aleks]

Hi,

I'd be very grateful if any of the mentors could give me a feedback for
my proposal -
https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/aleksmk/1


Thank you in advance

Cheers,
Aleks