BeagleBone® AI with bela cape

Joonif

Could I use BeagleBone® AI(not beaglebone black) with bela cape? If it could, how could I set bela?

giuliomoro

As of yesterday, a Google Summer of Code project has been approved which will add support for the Bela cape to the BeagleBone AI (see details of the project here https://elinux.org/BeagleBoard/GSoC/2021_Proposal/bela_on_bbai ). This will take a few months to complete and will be completed by the end of the summer.

Joonif

giuliomoro Thank you for reply!

damu_89

giuliomoro Have you heard any more updates about how this is going?

I can't wait to try it out 🙂

giuliomoro

actually just this week we had a breakthrough (courtesy of Google Summer of Code): https://github.com/giuliomoro/Bela-dhruva/tree/BBAI-support

most things work. Requires a 4.19 Xenomai kernel, which makes the BBAI crash on boot, at which point you need to press the RESET button to actually boot.

damu_89

giuliomoro Is this a process that you would be able to explain if I invested in the BBAI and Bela cape now? Or should I wait until the project is finished? Thanks very much

damu_89

Wow! That's fantastic. The summer of code is brilliant. There are a few other great project. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of several great projects, including the TidalCycles installer.

giuliomoro

there are a couple more weeks on the project, let's see where we get. One blocker is in the above mentioned kernel crash. Another one is that in order to run at full CPU clock, the BBAI requires active cooling via a fan or fan cape, which will make the stack a bit taller and noisier (the fan spins fast!) than a regular BBB-based Bela

l0calh05t

giuliomoro Hm, a fan cape would be impractical with the FACE/BEAST due to the connector in the middle of the board, right? Although I guess you could snip it off on the lower board
In any case, I'm very interested in how the project turns out, as I am running into the processing power limitations of the regular BBB

giuliomoro

Alternatively to the fan cape you could have a fan attached directly to the heat sink but then you'll need some sort of short stacking headers because the Bela cape won't fit directly on top of the fan. The CTAG stuff is the last one on the list, as it needs to get some IRQs to work. Hopefully we'll get it done this coming week.

l0calh05t fan cape would be impractical with the FACE/BEAST due to the connector in the middle of the board, right? Although I guess you could snip it off on the lower board

I just checked: you will need to snip it off indeed

jayrope

Is it correct, that the Cortex15 used here is dual core, running at 1.5 GHZ, and there is two of those, so that'd result in actually 4 cores to work with?

That would be a massive performance boost i suppose.

giuliomoro

That's two cores in total, running at 1.5GHz max. The A15 is faster than the BeagleBone Black/PocketBeagle's A8 in several applications. I measured it to be up to 5x in some cases running them both at 1GHz, IIRC. As mentioned, one issue is that the heat it generates will requires active cooling.

dhruvag2000

hi @damu_89 !

I can't wait to try it out 🙂

I have been working on this project as part of GSoC 2021, and there have been some promising updates in the last few weeks. You can find a brief summary that I have written here: https://elinux.org/DhruvaGole/ProjectReport and the link to my github fork of the Bela repo is: https://github.com/DhruvaG2000/Bela/tree/BBAI-support

Currently however, we are facing issues with stability of the xenomai patched 4.19 kernel on the BBAI, but we will try to get that sorted soon and try to release a BELA AI image. But this may still take time.

However, one can download this unstable image here: belaAI.img.xz and I have also written a my blog with detailed instructions of how you can upgrade to this (unstable) kernel, and also source compile and run examples from the terminal itself.

Feel free to ask any questions or report any difficulties you face if you happen to try out what I have described in my blog.

resynth

Hi @dhruvag2000

Good work, looking forward to trying it out. Just wondering if it's time to get a BBAI & CTAG cape.

Is this project still in development?
Is the CTAG supported or just Bela?
How're things going with the kernel stability? Is it usable system that works with the Bela IDE?

giuliomoro

resynth Is this project still in development?

The Google Summer of Code project officially ended last month. I have not had much time since, but Dhruva has kept looking into things a bit. My plan is to add support for BBAI in the generic Bela image, but that is at least a few months down the line, because there are a few other things in the making (...surprise!). One of the main blockers on the OS/image side is that the board at the moment boots fine only roughly 50% of the times when using the 4.19 Xenomai kernel and that's some nasty debugging/development to do there. I want to push it to the Xenomai mailing list and see if they have a clue because I don't.

resynth Is the CTAG supported or just Bela?

CTAG is supported only with ALSA at the moment (also the Bela cape by the way). Once the missing piece of the Bela side (IRQ from McASP to PRU) will be in place, it will support CTAG with the Bela real-time environment, too.

resynth Is it usable system that works with the Bela IDE?

The IDE works. I think we are still sub-usable overall at the moment though, given the kernel issue.

Eastin

Hello. @giuliomoro and @dhrubag2000

First of all, I was really happy that there were people who supported BBAI.
I just ordered BBAI+Fan cape and got it yesterday.

Now I can test an active noise reduction application using deep learning. Thank you very much.
If the Xenomai kernel isn't stable yet, I'd like to dig into it. Can you give me some guidance on how to do contribute on this kernel issue?

dhruvag2000

Eastin A few logs at boot can be found 1.here and 2.here
in 1, you can see the kernel crash taking place and after that the board needs a solid RESET 2-3 times to get it to boot. I am not very sure of what the reason could be yet.

silver2row

Hello,

To anyone and everyone here...is this effort still in order to be finalized at some point?

I am asking. I would like to find out exactly something in the realm of a time frame. I know everyone is busy and doing things along w/ killer-COVID19 out there and mRNA doses to handle the disease.

Outside of disease, music. I finally got to play a live electric w/ distortion sounds. It has taken 41 years of life and FINALLY!

I made the entire town upset.

So, outside of those facts, where are we? I mean...is there a particular group working to handle the differences in BBAI and BBB for the Bela Cape (full-size)?

If so, good on you guys. I am sure the extra power and oomph packed by dual-core, 1.5 Ghz arm cores is nice plus everything that is available on it, e.g. PRU, EVE, DSP, and so on...

Seth

P.S. So, I have fallen prey to laziness lately. Excuse me. I will try again and again while looking through the logs and ideas to maybe assist in figuring things out. Who knows? I may be actually able to help one day!

JMC64

Hello, any progress on AI ?

giuliomoro

unfortunately not from me. The 4.14 ti-xenomai kernel hasn't been updated. I have to check whether any of the most recent ones boots on the AI. I had tried 4.19 and 5.4 without success last summer I think. Maybe those got updated now ..

JMC64

giuliomoro More than one year later.. Did the project turn into abandonware ? Or does Bela.io cook something with a more modern and powerful / faster computer?
Thank you .. still love my pepper but I wish it could be more powerful.