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

    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.

    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.

    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.

    a month later

    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?

      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.

            17 days later

            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?

              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!

              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.

                4 months later

                Hello, any progress on AI ?

                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 ..

                  10 months later

                  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.

                    The BBAI was not the way forward, especially considering its poor power consumption characteristic and high price. I have done some tests with the follow up BBAI64 this year, but again our time is better spent elsewhere: too hot, big, expensive.

                    We're cooking something new Bela wise which is going to take a bit more, but also we have a great new module announced just today: https://www.crowdsupply.com/augmented-instruments/gliss

                      giuliomoro too bad. Was also hoping for more performance. What can you share about the new approach? Something more powerful than the AI 64?