PropGCC on a BeagleBone???

mindrobots

I just got my Beagle Bone back from the Beagle Hospital and it appears to be stable and running fine now. They had issues with the reset switches on a batch of them.

It has a USB Host port.
It has the drivers to talk to FTDI chips.
I can plug in a Prop board and it sees it as /dev/ttyUSB0
I loaded up Propforth on the Prop board and connected to it from the BeagleBone via screen - it worked fine.
It also has a viable GCC development environment running under an Angstrom Linux distribution.

The obvious path now is to build a propgcc to run on it...but this is where I start to get on shaky ground.

Is it as easy as stepping through the instructions on the WIKI page for propgcc and I'll end up (after a lengthy build time) with a working propgcc?

Beyond not having bstc are there any other pitfalls that might stop this project?

I've never done this before but once I clone the micro-SD card, I have a pretty safe environment to destroy!

Any thoughts, guidance or wisecracks appreciated.

Circuitsoft

No reason that shouldn't work. I think I've cross-compiled to an x86 target from an ARM host before. No reason propgcc shouldn't run on it. It's just Linux, and there (should be) nothing x86-specific in propgcc.

Heater.

I have a bunch of IGEP arm boards from ISEE, they are much like Beagles. They can run Angstrom but mine have Linaro. I'm confident that propgcc will compile and run there. Just have not found the time to do it.
I suspect it might take a while working from the SD card though so it might be an idea to work from a USB hard drive or mount a NFS share from your PC.
The lack of BST is a problem but I have mono installed on my IGEP and it runs the HomeSpun compiler so peraps that could be used.

rosco_pc

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?137452-Open-source-Spin-PASM-compiler-in-C-C works like a charm on ARM

jazzed

Nice idea. Do you have an interface in mind for programming?
Were still waiting to test the "spin -c pasmfile.spin" option from Roy.

mindrobots

Thanks for all the info and encouragement.

Since I haven't done anything like this before, I'm thinking the best course might be to get the propgcc build working on my Ubuntu laptop or desktop and then change the target to the arm processor (GCC seems capable of doing that). This sounds easier to me than making sure I have all the dependencies met on the Beagle Bone and then trying to build it over there.....much more fear and anger is down this path.

I hadn't gotten as far as thinking about possible programming interfaces. As the BBone comes out of the box, it's more of a server environment. Right now, it's sitting on my LAN and I'm SSH into it or through the 2 web interface (one takes you to the Cloud9 node.js development environment) , the other right now just serves up a few promo/documentation slides.

There's a lot of interesting stuff being done with the Beagles (and the Pandaboard which is next on my single board computer play list).

It has USB(host/slave) and GPIO and UARTS and such but doesn't really have video support like the Pandaboard, so it may need a propeller video/keyboard interface so you can talk to it directly as a standalone computer without ethernet connectivity.

It could be a host for my TetraProp PropForth cluster!

Wifi hotspot?
remote host for multiple propellers?
bigger brain for robot/UAV using propellers as slave sensor and movement managers
IF I get the toolchain working, it could be all kinds of fun!
IF I see something else shiny before then, well, we're in trouble.

Right now, someone is expecting the carpets to be cleaned.....and someone else is expecting my ELEV-8 to be built soon, so this is a sit in front of the TV and play activity.....along with SimpleIDE testing

Heater.

mindrobots.

My plan was to compile propggc actually on my ARM board. I like the idea of it being self sufficient and cross compiling is always a pain.
However I do have a cross compiler for the ARM target on my PC so I might give it a try.

mindrobots

Ultimately I want to be self-sufficient on the BBone or Pandaboard but since I've never done any of this, I thought the wise approach would be to flounder and fail in the full glory of mega-powered Linux than fail and die a slow death at the mercy of my ARM!