I'm very sure Bill's hardware will work with the BBB. If you want to run the Propeller development tools on the BBB then someone has to build them to run on there.
The whole job takes 24 hours or so on the Pi, should be a bit quicker on the BBB.
When you get stuck we can probably answer your questions. Well, only if you are running Debian on the BBB in my case.
Ya'll are simply AWESOME!
I appreciate the help. To tell the truth, I did not know Raspberry Pi existed until I saw a bunch of threads about it. The Beaglebone was recommened to me form one of the
Vendors I deal with. I have 4 BS240's and was going to use them is some way, but the propeller is absolutely what I need for my apps. Coupled with a beaglebone, it will
be what I needed. If I have too many setbacks, I will just buy a Raspberry Pi, and go through designing on that. It seems to be a favorite on this forum, and I am sure
Parallax has picked up on the success of the Pi. Because of my work, it would be advantageous to use android on the beaglebone, but that is a stretch. The HP/Prop
project is good for training, diagnostics, and development, as well as gives me insight into job categories that I can go into. Thanks again.
The BBB is a really nice board, unfortunately the "end user license" prohibits embedding it into commercial products. I have no idea if that would stand up in court or not, but most people will say "pass" and not try to embed the BBB in any volume products.
When I have a bit of time, I do plan on trying RoboPi on a BBB... but it will take many weeks before I can get to it.
p.s.
I should be receiving some Raspberry Pi Model B+'s today!!!! That will be fun.
Tracking says I'll get my first three B+'s by the end of the day!!!!
More next week when the postal order arrives from MCM, which I ordered before Element14 had stock... but when Element14 showed stock yesterday morning, and they now offer same day overnight shipping, I ordered more. I could not wait.
UPS dropped off the Raspberry Pi Model B+'s just before 7pm!
Due to dinner, I only had time to take some shots of the B+ by itself, and with my EZasPi prototyping board.
Tomorrow, I plan on trying RoboPi on the B+
boards meant for the previous Pi layout end up over hanging the USB/Eth side of the B+ by about 9mm, I'll dig out my calipers for more precise measurements tomorrow.
mklrobo,
The BBB is a really nice board, unfortunately the "end user license" prohibits embedding it into commercial products. I have no idea if that would stand up in court or not, but most people will say "pass" and not try to embed the BBB in any volume products.
Bill, I know that I have seen several people discussing commercial design with the BB folks on the forums without any mention that such a use was prohibited. I too remember seeing that but the explanation I heard was that they don't want to have someone ordering 500 or 1000 units from a downstream supplier and creating shortages nor someone making a board from the design files and calling it BeagleBone. If you plan to use it in commercial products in bulk they want to handle supply. I think it is definitely something they need to find a way to word better.
Firstly anything you publish is automatically copyright to you. That is to say no publishing of your design by anyone else without a license from you.
Secondly the Beagles are put out with some talk of a "Creative Commons License" but you will not find any reference to licensing on http://beagleboard.org/ except the small print at the bottom "Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence"
Which if you read it says "Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
for any purpose, even commercially.The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms."
It is not clear if that license is only for the website or the Beagle designs.
But we might assume it belongs to the design, which is published on the site.
Conclusion: Using Beagles commercially is perfectly acceptable and licensed.
Having said that, if you order a 1000 boards for your production run of your "Super Widget" don't be surprised if they say no an choose to sell them one at a time to hobbyists instead.
Reality is that Beagles are being used in many commercial products without any legal feedback so far.
Oh, but, if you make a Beagle or Beagle based design don't call it a "Beagle". That is a totally other question of trademark.
looks like they changed their minds, and now just "discourage" using the Beagle Bone Black in commercial products and reserve the right to change their design. Fair enough
Minor Updates
- I am working on a couple of new functions for the RoboPi API to make working with PWM for motor drivers easier
- I am using my Elf bot as the testbed for the new motor driver API
- gave up on finding my pings, and purchased a couple more
- with the new functions new revs of the object/libs/manuals will be released - hopefully sometime next week
- I've started working on providing a Python library, with the same API as the C library
- after RoboPiPy (the Python interface) I will resume work on HexPi and TBMST
Question
- Should I make a propgcc version of RoboPiLib? ie is there interest in programming RoboPi in C when running stand-alone?
UPS dropped off the Raspberry Pi Model B+'s just before 7pm!
Due to dinner, I only had time to take some shots of the B+ by itself, and with my EZasPi prototyping board.
Tomorrow, I plan on trying RoboPi on the B+
boards meant for the previous Pi layout end up over hanging the USB/Eth side of the B+ by about 9mm, I'll dig out my calipers for more precise measurements tomorrow.
I posted some photos on my site.
Now I'll go catch some ZZZzzz's...
Did you try your RoboPi board with the new B+? Any problems or does it work fine?
My testing got derailed by a short rush project... I hope to test RoboPi on a B+ today, and resume work on the new rev firmware tomorrow.
FYI, as EZasPi and Pi Jumper work with the B+ I am confident that RoboPi will as well - however it will overhang the USB ports by approx 9mm, just like EZasPi.
I just tested the Raspberry Pi Model B+ with RoboPi.
WORKS FINE!
I could even use one of the standoffs (not screwed into the B+) for some support, and a nylon screw in the other one to lift it above one of the dual USB jacks.
For safety, I also put some paper for now between the other USB jack and the bottom of RoboPi - on a real bot I'll just use some insulating tape.
I'll be posting some pics about it tonight on my site, will put link here after I posted.
I uploaded RoboPiLib_v0.81a.zip to the RoboPi page - a customer reported that the previous issue did not work on his new Raspbian installation, so I generated a new library with the latest Raspbian
In the Robotics forum, DiverBob posted a video update on his HUGE hexapod robot, and you can see RoboPi controlling one of the legs. Each leg will have its own RoboPi!
sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt
(delete the section "console=ttyAMA0,115200", save)
sudo nano /etc/inittab
(comment out the line respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100
I had a slighly more verbose version of this on page 6 of the RoboPi User Manual, but I will need to update it to reflect the changes in the latest Raspbian image.
The new Raspbian no longer has "kgdboc=ttyAMA0, 115200", so of course it need not be deleted
I am just wrapping up a large-ish article and some work, after which I will get back to finishing the upcoming release of RoboPiLib.
sudo nano /boot/cmdline.txt
(delete the section "console=ttyAMA0,115200", save)
sudo nano /etc/inittab
(comment out the line respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100
Ah, so you do. I did a PDF search for "propeller-load", didn't see anything, and moved on. I am using the propeller-load that you have on the product page, though. Thanks!
Ah, so you do. I did a PDF search for "propeller-load", didn't see anything, and moved on. I am using the propeller-load that you have on the product page, though. Thanks!
I uploaded RoboPiLib_v0.81a.zip to the RoboPi page - a customer reported that the previous issue did not work on his new Raspbian installation, so I generated a new library with the latest Raspbian
That new library corrected the issue I was having when I tried to compile my first C program that included the RoboPi Library. It would be nice to see that driver and RoboPi library eventually enhanced to include some of the additional Parallax sensors like the compass module, temperature/humidity, pressure sensor, Accelerometer, and gyroscope to offload those from the Raspberry Pi as well.
That new library corrected the issue I was having when I tried to compile my first C program that included the RoboPi Library. It would be nice to see that driver and RoboPi library eventually enhanced to include some of the additional Parallax sensors like the compass module, temperature/humidity, pressure sensor, Accelerometer, and gyroscope to offload those from the Raspberry Pi as well.
Here is a teaser of what is coming to a RoboPi near you...
Python support!
>>> import RoboPiLib as RoboPi
>>> import RoboPiDefs as isa
>>> RoboPi.RoboPiInit("/dev/ttyAMA0",115200)
/dev/ttyAMA0 Connected
>>> for x in range(16,24):
... RoboPi.pinMode(x,isa.PWM)
...
>>> for loop in range(1,1000000):
... for y in range(0,256):
... for led in range(16,24):
... RoboPi.analogWrite(led,y)
...
I started the test last night, and it is still runing...
I am working on updating the documentation, etc., and hoping for a new firmware release early next week.
RoboPi now fully supports both Python2.7 and Python3.2 on the Raspberry Pi.
I am working on the docs, and I have two programs as well, I'll be uploading it to the product page as soon as the new docs are done and I package up the v0.85 libs, firmware etc.
I'm a bit curious about software compatibility. It uses a totally different SoC than the Raspi. So:
1) I presume it will not boot from my Raspberry Pi SD cards with Raspbian or whatever.
2) Using Raspbian on this new SoC seems very silly anyway. Raspbian exists solely to boost floating point performance on the somewhat older ARM architecture of the Broadcom SoC which is not supported by current Debian.
3) Calling whatever they are running on the Banana "Raspbian" seems a bit underhand. Surely it is not identical.
4) Does it use the Raspbian package repositories or have they set up their own?
5) Why not just use Debian from which Raspbian is made and supports the new A7 SoC anyway.
6) What about software that is specific to the Raspi?. Will by Qt5 apps that run directly into the frame buffer on the Raspi using GPU acceleration work on the Bannana? I doubt it. What about the software for the camera module rspi-still and so on?
2) Using Raspbian on this new SoC seems very silly anyway. Raspbian exists solely to boost floating point performance on the somewhat older ARM architecture of the Broadcom SoC which is not supported by current Debian.
I largely agree, I wish their "Bananian" was Debian hard float, with the Wiring/GPIO/etc add-ons to make it largely compatible with Raspbian.
However as Raspbian is open source, so I think they took the path of least resistance. I wish they would toss out Wolfram/Mathematica, it is a waste of SD space on the card.
3) Calling whatever they are running on the Banana "Raspbian" seems a bit underhand. Surely it is not identical.
No, but given that it will also boot up and run on a Raspberry Pi, I don't have an issue with it. Personally, I'd have called it Bananian (a name they use for a light server Linux for the BPi) and added the compatibility stuff, and mentioned on the download page that it is largely compatible with Raspbian.
6) What about software that is specific to the Raspi?. Will by Qt5 apps that run directly into the frame buffer on the Raspi using GPU acceleration work on the Bannana? I doubt it. What about the software for the camera module rspi-still and so on?
I'll be doing more testing, but so far the impression I have is that anything that uses higher level API's, for which compatible libraries exist, will just work.
So I'd expect QT5 to work, as fb support is a linux thing, and as long as they have appropriate fb drivers it should just work.
Ditto for OpenGL.
Not so much for mpeg2 / h.264 yet, but I expect that to change.
Had I heard of this a few months back I may well have been trying to get hold of a BananaPi.
Well, except I'm all tooled up with ISEE IGEP cards, the Parallella, the P1 on the nano board, an assortment of MIPs based routers....
Problem now is the Raspberry Pi B+ is out, which I also have, and the Banana Pi is stuck on the old board layout. Perhaps there will be a Banana Pi + soon.
Hoping to continue resisting, at least for a while.
A Banana+ would be interesting!
In other news, there is a new Intel Gallileo 2, apparently with faster I/O. $69 @ NewEgg, but only 256MB, and runs at 400MHz.
Right now I want to see how long it will take me to get RoboPi working on a Banana... so far, my investigation says it should be /dev/ttyS2 (uart3), however that did not work with my RoboPi test program.
I also have to finish the latest version of the documentation, which includes the Python RoboPi API.
I just got it working. The problem turned out to be either old firmware (or no firmware) in the RoboPi I grabbed to test the Banana Pi with (as I did not want to take a RoboPi off one of my Raspberry Pi bots).
Heater's latest propeller-load works like a charm on the Banana Pi, I used it to load the latest firmware.
Now I can go sleep!
I'll update my Banana Pi review tomorrow to indicate RoboPi works with the BPi.
Comments
Ya'll are simply AWESOME!
I appreciate the help. To tell the truth, I did not know Raspberry Pi existed until I saw a bunch of threads about it. The Beaglebone was recommened to me form one of the
Vendors I deal with. I have 4 BS240's and was going to use them is some way, but the propeller is absolutely what I need for my apps. Coupled with a beaglebone, it will
be what I needed. If I have too many setbacks, I will just buy a Raspberry Pi, and go through designing on that. It seems to be a favorite on this forum, and I am sure
Parallax has picked up on the success of the Pi. Because of my work, it would be advantageous to use android on the beaglebone, but that is a stretch. The HP/Prop
project is good for training, diagnostics, and development, as well as gives me insight into job categories that I can go into. Thanks again.
The BBB is a really nice board, unfortunately the "end user license" prohibits embedding it into commercial products. I have no idea if that would stand up in court or not, but most people will say "pass" and not try to embed the BBB in any volume products.
When I have a bit of time, I do plan on trying RoboPi on a BBB... but it will take many weeks before I can get to it.
p.s.
I should be receiving some Raspberry Pi Model B+'s today!!!! That will be fun.
Tracking says I'll get my first three B+'s by the end of the day!!!!
More next week when the postal order arrives from MCM, which I ordered before Element14 had stock... but when Element14 showed stock yesterday morning, and they now offer same day overnight shipping, I ordered more. I could not wait.
Due to dinner, I only had time to take some shots of the B+ by itself, and with my EZasPi prototyping board.
Tomorrow, I plan on trying RoboPi on the B+
boards meant for the previous Pi layout end up over hanging the USB/Eth side of the B+ by about 9mm, I'll dig out my calipers for more precise measurements tomorrow.
I posted some photos on my site.
Now I'll go catch some ZZZzzz's...
Bill, I know that I have seen several people discussing commercial design with the BB folks on the forums without any mention that such a use was prohibited. I too remember seeing that but the explanation I heard was that they don't want to have someone ordering 500 or 1000 units from a downstream supplier and creating shortages nor someone making a board from the design files and calling it BeagleBone. If you plan to use it in commercial products in bulk they want to handle supply. I think it is definitely something they need to find a way to word better.
Secondly the Beagles are put out with some talk of a "Creative Commons License" but you will not find any reference to licensing on http://beagleboard.org/ except the small print at the bottom "Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence"
Which if you read it says "Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
for any purpose, even commercially.The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms."
It is not clear if that license is only for the website or the Beagle designs.
But we might assume it belongs to the design, which is published on the site.
Conclusion: Using Beagles commercially is perfectly acceptable and licensed.
Having said that, if you order a 1000 boards for your production run of your "Super Widget" don't be surprised if they say no an choose to sell them one at a time to hobbyists instead.
Reality is that Beagles are being used in many commercial products without any legal feedback so far.
Oh, but, if you make a Beagle or Beagle based design don't call it a "Beagle". That is a totally other question of trademark.
looks like they changed their minds, and now just "discourage" using the Beagle Bone Black in commercial products and reserve the right to change their design. Fair enough
Minor Updates
- I am working on a couple of new functions for the RoboPi API to make working with PWM for motor drivers easier
- I am using my Elf bot as the testbed for the new motor driver API
- gave up on finding my pings, and purchased a couple more
- with the new functions new revs of the object/libs/manuals will be released - hopefully sometime next week
- I've started working on providing a Python library, with the same API as the C library
- after RoboPiPy (the Python interface) I will resume work on HexPi and TBMST
Question
- Should I make a propgcc version of RoboPiLib? ie is there interest in programming RoboPi in C when running stand-alone?
My testing got derailed by a short rush project... I hope to test RoboPi on a B+ today, and resume work on the new rev firmware tomorrow.
FYI, as EZasPi and Pi Jumper work with the B+ I am confident that RoboPi will as well - however it will overhang the USB ports by approx 9mm, just like EZasPi.
http://www.mikronauts.com/2014/07/17/raspberry-pi-b-with-rev-2-proto-board/
http://www.mikronauts.com/2014/07/17/raspberry-pi-b-with-pi-jumper/
I just tested the Raspberry Pi Model B+ with RoboPi.
WORKS FINE!
I could even use one of the standoffs (not screwed into the B+) for some support, and a nylon screw in the other one to lift it above one of the dual USB jacks.
For safety, I also put some paper for now between the other USB jack and the bottom of RoboPi - on a real bot I'll just use some insulating tape.
I'll be posting some pics about it tonight on my site, will put link here after I posted.
A couple of more pics & info on the blog post, in case anyone is interested:
http://www.mikronauts.com/2014/07/29/raspberry-pi-b-with-robopi/
I uploaded RoboPiLib_v0.81a.zip to the RoboPi page - a customer reported that the previous issue did not work on his new Raspbian installation, so I generated a new library with the latest Raspbian
http://www.mikronauts.com/raspberry-pi/robopi/
In the Robotics forum, DiverBob posted a video update on his HUGE hexapod robot, and you can see RoboPi controlling one of the legs. Each leg will have its own RoboPi!
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/135857-Next-large-robot/page20
I was getting the following error:
The solution is here: http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/141469-SimpleIDE-for-Raspberry-Pi-Raspian/page4
It is:
I had a slighly more verbose version of this on page 6 of the RoboPi User Manual, but I will need to update it to reflect the changes in the latest Raspbian image.
The new Raspbian no longer has "kgdboc=ttyAMA0, 115200", so of course it need not be deleted
I am just wrapping up a large-ish article and some work, after which I will get back to finishing the upcoming release of RoboPiLib.
I'll be adding an explicit "how to use propeller load" to the next rev of the manual.
(and you are welcome)
I finally finished, and just posted my Raspberry Pi Model B+ review.
In the "Hardware Compatibility" section I had a RoboPi on a model B+
The B+ uses about half the power a B uses! For robots I'll use Model A's, and B+'s.
Power utilization data: http://www.mikronauts.com/raspberry-pi/bplus-review/5/
In other news...
I finally managed to build Swig on my Pi, and used it to make a Python wrapper around RoboPiLib.
The good news: It imports just fine
The bad news: It does not talk to RoboPi yet. Carmak says "I see debugging in your future..."
Kudos to Heater - he modified propeller-load so any GPIO can be used for reset, and it works!
That new library corrected the issue I was having when I tried to compile my first C program that included the RoboPi Library. It would be nice to see that driver and RoboPi library eventually enhanced to include some of the additional Parallax sensors like the compass module, temperature/humidity, pressure sensor, Accelerometer, and gyroscope to offload those from the Raspberry Pi as well.
Robert
Glad to hear the new library helped you!
I plan to keep improving the firmware with such additions
I am testing the Python API right now, so far so good...
I am hoping to release the v0.85 firmware with updated docs, firmware and addition of Python support in a few days.
Here is a teaser of what is coming to a RoboPi near you...
Python support!
>>> import RoboPiLib as RoboPi >>> import RoboPiDefs as isa >>> RoboPi.RoboPiInit("/dev/ttyAMA0",115200) /dev/ttyAMA0 Connected >>> for x in range(16,24): ... RoboPi.pinMode(x,isa.PWM) ... >>> for loop in range(1,1000000): ... for y in range(0,256): ... for led in range(16,24): ... RoboPi.analogWrite(led,y) ...I started the test last night, and it is still runing...
I am working on updating the documentation, etc., and hoping for a new firmware release early next week.
RoboPi now fully supports both Python2.7 and Python3.2 on the Raspberry Pi.
I am working on the docs, and I have two programs as well, I'll be uploading it to the product page as soon as the new docs are done and I package up the v0.85 libs, firmware etc.
I've started getting RoboPi running on the Banana Pi. If you are interested, you can read about it in my Banana Pi review at:
http://www.mikronauts.com/banana-pi/bpi-review/
It stacks on without problems, I just need to get the right tty to talk to it! So far I know it is uart3.
I'm a bit curious about software compatibility. It uses a totally different SoC than the Raspi. So:
1) I presume it will not boot from my Raspberry Pi SD cards with Raspbian or whatever.
2) Using Raspbian on this new SoC seems very silly anyway. Raspbian exists solely to boost floating point performance on the somewhat older ARM architecture of the Broadcom SoC which is not supported by current Debian.
3) Calling whatever they are running on the Banana "Raspbian" seems a bit underhand. Surely it is not identical.
4) Does it use the Raspbian package repositories or have they set up their own?
5) Why not just use Debian from which Raspbian is made and supports the new A7 SoC anyway.
6) What about software that is specific to the Raspi?. Will by Qt5 apps that run directly into the frame buffer on the Raspi using GPU acceleration work on the Bannana? I doubt it. What about the software for the camera module rspi-still and so on?
LOGi FPGA Development Board for Raspberry Pi - Beaglebone
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1575992013/logi-fpga-development-board-for-raspberry-pi-beagl
Yes, it is a very nice little SBC, with a more powerful SOC.
True, however their mod allows a Pi to boot from their version of Raspbian. I'll be trying that very soon.
I largely agree, I wish their "Bananian" was Debian hard float, with the Wiring/GPIO/etc add-ons to make it largely compatible with Raspbian.
However as Raspbian is open source, so I think they took the path of least resistance. I wish they would toss out Wolfram/Mathematica, it is a waste of SD space on the card.
No, but given that it will also boot up and run on a Raspberry Pi, I don't have an issue with it. Personally, I'd have called it Bananian (a name they use for a light server Linux for the BPi) and added the compatibility stuff, and mentioned on the download page that it is largely compatible with Raspbian.
It defaults to the Raspbian package system, I was able to install quite a bit of software (listed in the review) that I normally use on the Pi.
See above, I pretty much agree - except I'd add the WiringPi, GPIO etc
I'll be doing more testing, but so far the impression I have is that anything that uses higher level API's, for which compatible libraries exist, will just work.
So I'd expect QT5 to work, as fb support is a linux thing, and as long as they have appropriate fb drivers it should just work.
Ditto for OpenGL.
Not so much for mpeg2 / h.264 yet, but I expect that to change.
Well, except I'm all tooled up with ISEE IGEP cards, the Parallella, the P1 on the nano board, an assortment of MIPs based routers....
Problem now is the Raspberry Pi B+ is out, which I also have, and the Banana Pi is stuck on the old board layout. Perhaps there will be a Banana Pi + soon.
So far.
Hoping to continue resisting, at least for a while.
A Banana+ would be interesting!
In other news, there is a new Intel Gallileo 2, apparently with faster I/O. $69 @ NewEgg, but only 256MB, and runs at 400MHz.
Right now I want to see how long it will take me to get RoboPi working on a Banana... so far, my investigation says it should be /dev/ttyS2 (uart3), however that did not work with my RoboPi test program.
I also have to finish the latest version of the documentation, which includes the Python RoboPi API.
I just got it working. The problem turned out to be either old firmware (or no firmware) in the RoboPi I grabbed to test the Banana Pi with (as I did not want to take a RoboPi off one of my Raspberry Pi bots).
Heater's latest propeller-load works like a charm on the Banana Pi, I used it to load the latest firmware.
Now I can go sleep!
I'll update my Banana Pi review tomorrow to indicate RoboPi works with the BPi.
http://www.mikronauts.com/banana-pi/bpi-review/