Interfacing with Beagley-AI

ocramz

Hi all,
I'm gathering options for a vision-sound project, and the wonderful Bela looks like a great candidate.

It's not clear to me whether it's possible to interface the Bela cape to something like the Beagley-AI (https://docs.beagleboard.org/boards/beagley/ai/index.html). Admittedly my HW fundamentals are a bit rusty (I do machine learning usually).

I imagine the Beagley, being a BBB derivative, would provide the OS and compute backbone, and the Bela cape extending it somehow, is this intuition correct?
The data flow would be: a neural model runs on the Beagley, producing predictions as a data stream (few tens of XY coordinates per video frame), which would then be sent as control signals to the Bela for sound generation.

What hardware connections / drivers / wires would one need to pull this off?

Thank you in advance for any and all pointers.

giuliomoro

You'd need to make a hardware adapter that brings the desired signals to the BeagleY header. Also, you'd need to adapt the device tree overlay for the audio cape (bb bone audi 02) so it works with BeagleY. With all that in place, you should be able to play sound through ALSA, at which point you'd call either ALSA directly or something on top of it (pulseaudio/rtaudio/portaudio/jack) to start and write the audio.

ocramz

giuliomoro Thank you so much, though I was hoping for a higher-level solution.

Since the data rate between the boards would be quite low (less than 50 kbps or so ?), wouldn't it be enough to set some GPIO values on one board and read them out from the other one? Would it be simpler to interface a full Bela kit (with the BBB underneath) to the BeagleY via GPIO e.g. UART ?

giuliomoro

Oh ok. I thought you wanted to connect a Bela cape to the BeagleY. For what you are describing now, UART would be perfect.