BeagleLogic was born out of a project idea using the BeagleBone Black, and I am thankful to Jason Kridner and the BeagleBoard.org community for accepting it as a mentored project under the Google Summer of Code 2014. As the GSoC program officially ended last week, here is a video report highlighting what’s been accomplished so far, over a period of 3 months from 19th May to 18th August.
It was an awesome experience this summer, interacting with the community and developing the codebase for a project that showcases the capability of the two little yet powerful integrated Programmable Real-Time Units (PRUs) on the AM335x SoC that powers the BeagleBone Black to realize a 14-channel, 100Msps, 360 MB buffer Logic Analyzer which by far, offers the best value for a 55$ board which you can use not only to develop your embedded projects but also to debug them on-site without any extra hardware requirement. All the magic happens inside the firmware loaded into the PRUs and the kernel driver which manages sharing the system memory with them.
This project also saw me doing many things for the first time. It was the first time I compiled a Linux kernel and wrote myself a kernel module that is now a part of the BeagleBone community kernel, and I look forward to getting it merged upstream. The Web Client for BeagleLogic (link) is my first web application using HTML5 and Bootstrap for a lightweight web client for BeagleLogic. The backend I’ve written for the web client is my first Node.JS based application. I found these frameworks quite interesting and hope to work on projects in these areas in the future.
Google Summer of Code has been the best thing to happen to me so far, and I’ll be looking forward to it in the years to come.
Have fun with BeagleLogic. Also, do write back to me with how BeagleLogic helped you debug helped you debug your circuit and learn more about logic protocols!