I’m delighted to announce that my proposal with BeagleBoard.org has been accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2014. Here is a link to the announcement on the official BeagleBoard.org page.
[A brief introduction to Google Summer of Code [GSoC]: it’s an initiative by Google to encourage student participation in Open Source projects. Through this program, students work on projects and proposals under participating organizations for a period of 3 months, and Google pays a handsome stipend. The students are paired with experienced mentors from the organization who assist them and guide them during the period]
For the next 3 months, I will be working on building BeagleLogic, a software that will be leveraging the power of the Programmable Real-Time Unit [PRU] available on the BeagleBone Black (and the original BeagleBone) to convert it into a Logic Analyser that can help people understand and visualise the digital signals they are dealing with.
Matt Ranostay and Hunyue Yau from BeagleBoard.org will be my mentors for the project.
I will be working closely with the sigrok project, which is an open source signal analysis software, and which would act as the back-end of the project. It supports a large family of digital multimeters, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and also includes scriptable protocol decoding support. One of the first tasks in this project is to integrate support for the on-chip PRU under libsigrok, the skeleton driver has already been created in my fork of the library.
I’m looking forward to a great summer 🙂 and I would like to thank BeagleBoard.org community for their acceptance. I would also like to thank Google for the wonderful opportunity you provide to us students to connect with the Open Source Community through your Summer of Code program, and seek to gain experience that will help me in the future.
Future updates will be posted on this blog, or will be shared on a separate blog, if necessary.
For reference, and as a guideline for future GSoC applicants, I attach a copy of the proposal I submitted. The format of the proposal varies from organization to organization; yet the proposal would give a clear idea of the groundwork that is done in general before a proposal is submitted. The proposal has been subject to several revisions after feedback from the BeagleBoard.org community.