will the 'click' boards still work?
wondering about a cheap wifi click board (without having to use the usb host port, which Ive other plans for)

pre-ordered today, hope its here before Superbooth, then I might be able to bring along a project to show you 😉

This is our pinout:

alt text

  • green/red overlays are Bela internal pins (McASP/SPI/button)
  • light blue overlays are Bela user pins (digitals/LED, these can be disabled in software)

it seem that you may be able to fit a Click board in the lower part, if that does not require the I2C or PWM0 bus, but we did not try it ourselves. Check the spec of the wifi Click board you are thinking of . That most likely will be SPI I assume? Actually, it could also use I2C as long as it does not use addresses 0x18 0x54 0x55 0x56 0x57.

Here’s the click overlay... so we can see pins (possibly) used.

alt text

alt text

from here

Most of the WiFi cards seems to use UART.
( I think they also used AN/RST, which are P1 p2&4, which I think is clashing with PRU1 (9/11)? so that might be an issue ... Im a bit confused about what light blue means... does it mean you can disable, but you 'lose features'?)

so seems the uart would be fine, as long as you just position 1, and uart4

generally looks like you'll get a few different options depending which position you used, seems like bela does not clash with the P2 connections, but does clash with P1

note: to be clear, click in pos 2 is fig 45 rotated 180 degrees, i.e. AN/PWN point to the outside of the board in both positions
this means whilst in pos1 you cannot use SPI (as it would be SPI0) , in pos2 you can since its using SPI1, similarly you use UART4 (Pos1) or UART0(pos2)

Anyway will look deeper once my BelaMini arrives 🙂
I guess it should be possible to come up with a list of click boards that are compatible with belamini which might be quite useful for users.

EDIT: feel free to move this questions to a new topic, if you prefer to keep this for more belamini announcement type posts, rather than technical.

    The D... pins are the Bela Digital pins, so we should add a software feature that allows to ignore individual pins if they need to be used for something else. On the other hand, if they are muxed to something else (e.g.: UART), then no need for Bela to ignore them: simply mux them away.
    However, P1 2/4 do have a resistor and LED connected to them, so whether you can actually use them for other purposes, depends on what you connect to them.

    thetechnobear Most of the WiFi cards seems to use UART.

    that seems promising: UART4 is available in position1, and UART0 can be pinmuxed properly in position2. However, UART0 is the system debugging UART, so maybe that will have to be disabled in uEnv.txt

    thetechnobear EDIT: feel free to move this questions to a new topic, if you prefer to keep this for more belamini announcement type posts, rather than technical.

    Feel free to start a new one when you have a list of compatible click boards ! 🙂

        25 days later

        Does the image https://github.com/BelaPlatform/bela-image-builder/releases/tag/v0.3.2 already run with the Bela Mini prototype? I'm wanting to demo and wondering if I need to only demo with the Black Wireless and full-size Bela.

        Sorry I haven't yet gotten around to do a test dtbo for Bela Mini in https://github.com/beagleboard/bb.org-overlays for use with the standard Debian images, but will get that done soon. It isn't really that complicated. Not sure if it is a bottleneck for you.

        nope! we are still stuck to an old uboot which does not support the PB and uboot overlays. I think I sent you instructions on how to make a v0.3.1 image boot on the PB. I am not sure if it would work on v0.3.2 . When Liam is back, he shall update our uboot first thing!

          7 days later

          Hi!
          Would it be possible/are all the necessary pins available for another DAC add the 'missing' 8 analog outputs to the bela mini?

          On the Bela cape the analog ADC and DAC are on the same SPI bus and they are both using GPIOs for chip select (instead of using the SPI chip's own chip select pin). As such, the clock, MISO and MOSI lines are surely available on the Mini and in fact they are in use by the ADC already. You just need to locate an available GPIO (there are plenty on the PocketBeagle) and you can use that. It just requires a one-line code change in pru_rtaudio.p, so that's totally doable.

          17 days later

          giuliomoro nope! we are still stuck to an old uboot which does not support the PB and uboot overlays. I think I sent you instructions on how to make a v0.3.1 image boot on the PB. I am not sure if it would work on v0.3.2 . When Liam is back, he shall update our uboot first thing!

          does this mean its not on the 4.x kernel, unlike full fat bela?

          how's it going with bela mini production/release?.... do you have an estimate on shipping date?

          no rush, ive plenty of other things to be getting on with 🙂

            The v0.3.1/v0.3.2 rely on an old, patched version of uboot. The Bela Mini protos have been running on a v0.3.1 (so still Debian Stretch with Linux 4.4.87with a yet-more-hacked uboot. Before they ship, Liam will have updated uboot on our image so that we can run all the boards with the same image.

            As for shipping date, mid-late May is what we are currently aiming for

              6 days later

              Hi,

              This is a dummy question but: will the power consumption be approximately the same with Bela Mini and regular Bela? Meaning that I'd need 5V 2 to 3A power supply? I didn't find information about this on Pocketbeagle's wiki.

              The power consumption will be very similar (same CPU!), but I think it is more in the range of 450mA (excluding the power speakers) rather than 2A.

              12 days later

              Psyched, cannot wait for my Bela mini to arrive!

              13 days later

              giuliomoro hey I just noticed the date slipped from May to June, just as I preordered :-)
              How close are you to shipping the hardware and patching uboot? (I noticed 0.3.3 does not boot on the pocket B.B. - I assume this is why).
              BTW met one of your team at the QMUL event last weekend, thanks for turning me on to this project - can’t wait to get stuck in!

                  Mellor hey I just noticed the date slipped from May to June, just as I preordered :-)

                  We should be able to ship the orders placed so far at the ned of May, but those coming in now may have to wait one extra week, while we clear the backlog.
                  We have a working u-boot, see here: https://github.com/BelaPlatform/bela-image-builder/issues/75 .

                  Mellor BTW met one of your team at the QMUL event last weekend, thanks for turning me on to this project - can’t wait to get stuck in!

                  brilliant! What they did there looked really nice

                        That's great I'm up and running with Bela running on a Pocket BB. For info I was able to build and deploy u-boot on the 0.3.3 image I'd already downloaded and copied to an SD card:

                        mkdir ~/bela
cd ~/bela
git clone https://github.com/giuliomoro/Bootloader-Builder.git
cd Bootloader-Builder
# this was a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 image so needed make and gcc
sudo apt-get install make gcc
./build.sh
# mount the sd card at /dev/sdb containing the 0.3.3 image
sudo mkdir /media/bela
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/bela
# copy u-boot and MLO
sudo cp ~/Bootloader-Builder/deploy/am335x_evm/u-boot-am335x_evm-v2018.03-r8.img /media/bela/u-boot.img
sudo cp ~/Bootloader-Builder/deploy/am335x_evm/MLO-am335x_evm-v2018.03-r8 /media/bela/MLO
# unmount the SD card
sudo umount /media/bela

                        Just need a Bela Mini now :-)