Gem with PB2 industrial

Knallberto

Hi, I would like to ust GEM with the industrial version of the pocketbeagle 2 as it has built in eMMC. It seems to work fine booting from the SD card. Is there an easy way to copy the SD card to the eMMC? The command from the old Bela (/opt/Bela/bela_flash_emmc.sh) is not working.

giuliomoro

Knallberto he command from the old Bela (/opt/Bela/bela_flash_emmc.sh) is not working.

That won't work. Follow Beagleboard's instructions.

Knallberto It seems to work fine booting from the SD card

Do you get the full 1GB of RAM and the eMMC to show up?

Ward I'm not sure if a recent enough copy of the overlays is included in Gem's image?

It's the latest at the time of the image build, which currently is February 5th I think. I can build another one.

Ward

Also registering interest in PB2 industrial support here as it has 1GB ram instead of 512MB.

I found this and that seems to imply supporting both 512MB and 1GB can be built-in into the image. I'm not sure if a recent enough copy of the overlays is included in Gem's image?

Knallberto

giuliomoro That won't work. Follow Beagleboard's instructions.

Thanks. I could not find instructions, do you now if there are any available or what to search for sepcifically?

giuliomoro Do you get the full 1GB of RAM and the eMMC to show up?

No, I think I only see 512MB

giuliomoro

Knallberto Thanks. I could not find instructions, do you now if there are any available or what to search for sepcifically?

they say you need to install the bb-beagle-flasher package and then run beagle-flasher...

If you don't have an internet connection on your PB2 you can install it by downloading these three packages on your host and drag them on the IDE all at once:

http://debian.beagleboard.org/arm64/pool/main/b/bb-beagle-flasher/bb-beagle-flasher_1.20240718.1-0%7ebookworm%2b20250529_arm64.deb
http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/lzo2/liblzo2-2_2.10-2_arm64.deb
http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/b/btrfs-progs/btrfs-progs_6.2-1%2bdeb12u2_arm64.deb

Knallberto No, I think I only see 512MB

I'll make a new image that should hopefully automatically bring in the needed changes.

giuliomoro

@Knallberto @Ward try this image https://github.com/BelaPlatform/gem-image-builder/releases/tag/v1.0.1
It comes with beagle-flasher preinstalled and it should (?) recognise the 1GB RAM. DIdn't test it myself because I don't have a PB2 industrial

Ward

giuliomoro thanks!

I don't actually have an industrial yet as I only found out it existed due to this thread.

Knallberto

giuliomoro it should (?) recognise the 1GB RAM

Thanks for the image.

In the IDE I get: root@bela:~/Bela#` free -h

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           442Mi       227Mi        10Mi       840Ki       219Mi       214Mi
Swap:          1.2Gi          0B       `1.2Gi

giuliomoro

so that's a no ...
but the beagle-flasher should work?

Can you run the following on your Industrial? hexdump -C /sys/bus/i2c/devices/0-0050/eeprom ?

Knallberto

root@bela:~/Bela# hexdump -C /sys/bus/i2c/devices/0-0050/eeprom
00000000  aa 55 33 ee 01 37 00 10  2e 00 50 4f 43 4b 45 54  |.U3..7....POCKET|
00000010  42 45 41 47 4c 32 41 31  49 30 41 31 30 30 30 30  |BEAGL2A1I0A10000|
00000020  49 30 41 30 41 31 30 30  30 31 30 34 32 36 50 42  |I0A0A100010426PB|
00000030  32 49 30 30 32 35 36 36  11 02 00 a8 12 fe ff ff  |2I002566........|
00000040  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
*
00001000

giuliomoro

can you try booting a beagleboard 6.12 image from 12th of february or later and see if it does recognise the 1GB ?

Knallberto

I flashed an SD card with PocketBeagle 2 Debian 13 v6.18.x-k3 Io% (LTS-Dec-2027) from the BeagleBoard Imager menu. I get:

debian@BeagleBone:~$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 911Mi 196Mi 454Mi 1.1Mi 277Mi 715Mi
Swap: 1.4Gi 0B 1.4Gi

giuliomoro

that's good, can you try a beagleboard image with 6.12, though?

Knallberto

giuliomoro can you try a beagleboard image with 6.12, though?

Sorry, now I took PocketBeagle 2 Debian 13 v6.12.x-ti IoT(Stable). I get:
debian@BeagleBone:~$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 916Mi 233Mi 457Mi 820Ki 241Mi 683Mi
Swap: 1.4Gi 0B 1.4Gi

giuliomoro

OK, there's hope. Let me check with beagleboard.

Knallberto

Ok thank you!

Another thing: I tried to flash the eMMC using
sudo beagle-flasher
Then I removed the SD card and tried to boot Bela from the eMMC, but I cannot access it via the Bela IDE anymore.
Booting from the SD card works normally.
I used the gem-image-builder v1.0.1 image and also installed the three packages you mentioned.
Is there anything else I need to do?

giuliomoro

Knallberto Then I removed the SD card and tried to boot Bela from the eMMC, but I cannot access it via the Bela IDE anymore.

Any signs of life on the LEDs when booting from eMMC?

Knallberto

Blue LED is blinking (but my PD Patch seems not to be running)

giuliomoro

No sign of life over USB ? That's weird.

Did you try flashing the emmc from the beagle 6.12 image?

Knallberto

giuliomoro No sign of life over USB ? That's weird.

No, I tried ssh root@192.168.6.2 and received:
ssh: connect to host 192.168.6.2 port 22: Connection timed out
I also tried loading Bela IDE in the browser.

giuliomoro Did you try flashing the emmc from the beagle 6.12 image?

No I did not, I can try this tomorrow.