thetechnobear Also Iām assuming our bela board is not used? Or am I misunderstanding?
The Bela + BeagleBone is plugged in at the back of the module, see rev01 at the top and rev02 at the bottom
(note that in this picture, the BBB used for rev01 had a broken mini USB-B port, so I just soldered the wires to the SMD pads on the board), while the rev02 uses a BeagleBone Green):
This will fit all Bela capes from Kickstarter onwards (revB1) onwards.
kind of. The BeagleBone is pretty tall compared to the height of a Eurorack module, so you will need an angled USB connector for the cable to the computer (which is broken out to a USB - B port on the front panel). So, depending on your case and the modules above/below it you may find it difficult to fit both the USB device and the USB host cables in. We are therefore planning to ship the module with a BeagleBone Green, as it has both USB ports on the same side and the module can thus fit on all cases.
You can see that in rev02 we moved the BeagleBone further down the module so that there is just enough space at the top for the USB cables to be plugged in.
Note that the BBG uses micro USB, so the module will come with micro USB as a default. We may give an option for pre-fitted mini USB (BBB-like), or leave it as a DIY option.
Also is the intention to keep the bela software compatible across both platforms?
( useful for development/prototyping I think)
Yes. You can have a look at what the modular branch looks like just now and how it differs from the regular stable branch (the latter is going to become the new master very shortly): there are some changes in the PRU.cpp
file, to account for the use of inverting amplifiers for analog and digital inputs.
Right now these are compile-time options, but we will have a board-detection function that should be able to switch at runtime. In order to detect the modular cape, we will short two GPIO pins together on the cape and use them as a generator/detector pair, to check if toggling one affects the other. This is not 100% fool-proof (as an user may have shorted them together in their design), but it's the best idea we could come up with for automatic detection.