BeagleBoard/GSoC/Ideas-2016

=Welcome!= BeagleBoard.org hopes to be accepted as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code for 2013! Below, we've collected project ideas for the 2013 GSoC.

Background
BeagleBoard.org is a volunteer organization that seeks to advance the state of open-source software on open-source hardware platforms capable of running high-level languages and operating systems (primarily Linux) in embedded environments. Born from taking mobile phone processors and putting them on low-cost boards to build affordable desktop computers, BeagleBoard.org has evolved to focus on the needs of the "maker" community with greater focus on the I/O needed for controlling motors and reading sensors to build things like robots, 3d printers, flying drones, in-car computer systems and much more. Past BeagleBoard.org GSoC projects included an RPC framework for heterogeneous processor communication, a transparent USB packet sniffer, ARM optimizations for XBMC, ARM optimizations for FFTs, make-shift pulse-width-modulation and RPC optimizations for OpenCV.BeagleBoard.org has benefited from sponsorship from Texas Instruments, Circuitco, Digi-Key and others, but avoids any dependence on that sponsorship for sustaining the effort. The project has evolved over the past few years with over 100,000 boards in circulation with developers worldwide and strong roots in the Linaro, Yocto Project, Angstrom Distribution and Linux communities---and support for running most major Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Android, Fedora, Debian, ArchLinux, Gentoo, Buildroot and many more.

Students will be expected to demonstrate an understanding of cross-compiling before being accepted, but support for demonstration is available through the IRC channel that typically has approximately 150 online chatters logged on at any time, most with sufficient experience to explain the process.

' Every accepted student will be sent a BeagleBone Black before the first week of coding for testing their project. '

Additional hardware will be provided depending on need and value.

For more information, check out http://beagleboard.org and http://beagleboard.org/brief.

Students looking for ideas
Student proposals can encompass projects inspired from the following list of ideas or can include personal project ideas. Previous Google Summer of Code projects show that the key to success is being passionate about your project, so propose something that is extremely interesting to you, even if it is not on this list. We will be glad to help students develop ideas into projects via the BeagleBoard IRC or the BeagleBoard mailing list. There are many potential project ideas and we will match students to projects based on their interests and help scope the proposals to something that can be completed in the Summer of Code timeframe.

There are more than 300 existing projects listed at http://beagleboard.org/project. If you are interested in one of the projects listed on the BeagleBoard.org projects page, talk with the project members to see if there are any aspects of their projects that can be used to create a GSoC project. There are also several ideas on theECE497 class project idea list. You can also check out last year's idea page.

Mentors wondering where to help
Please start by registering your idea below by following the template provided with the existing examples. Furthermore, scroll down to the bottom and give everyone a bit of information about your expertise and availability by adding yourself to the table.

General requirements
All projects have the following basic requirements:
 * 1) The project must be registered on http://beagleboard.org/project.
 * 2) All newly generated materials must be released under an open source license.
 * 3) Individual students shall retain copyright on their works.
 * 4) Source code generated during the project must be released on github.com (to be cloned to github.com/beagleboard on successful completion).
 * 5) The registration on http://beagleboard.org/project must include an RSS feed with project announcements and updates at every milestone.  Sources for the RSS feed should be blogger.com, wordpress.com, or some other established blog-hosting service with known reliability.
 * 6) To help you to break your project down into manageable chunks and also to help the project's mentors to better support your efforts, weekly project status reports should be e-mailed to the project's mentors and the organization administrator (Jason Kridner). Each status report should outline:
 * 7) What was accomplished that week,
 * 8) any issues that prevented that week's goals from being completed and
 * 9) your goals for the next week.
 * 10) Students will provide two recorded presentations, one near the beginning of the project summarizing their project goals and another in the wrap-up phase to summarize their accomplishments.  Examples can be found on http://beagleboard.org/gsoc.
 * 11) Students will demonstrate their ability to cross-compile and utilize version control software by creating a "Hello World" application and generating a pull request to https://github.com/jadonk/gsoc-application/tree/master/ExampleEntryJasonKridner.  For assistance, please visit http://beagleboard.org/chat or utilize the beagleboard-gsoc Google Group.  The "Hello World" application must print your name and the date out in an ARM Linux environment.  Freely available emulators may be used to test your application or you can ask anyone on the chat or mailing list to help you test.
 * 12) 9.	All projects will produce reusable software components and will not be "what–I-built-over-my-summer-vacation" projects. Including a hardware component is welcome, but the project *deliverable* will be software that may be utilized by a wide audience of the BeagleBoard community.

=Ideas= There are several areas needing contributions: Kernel: Improving the state of the Linux kernel including improved ARM/OMAP/Sitara platform support, simplifying the development of add-on hardware for embedded systems and exchanging hardware connectivity information with userspace. Secondary processor support (RPC/gcc/etc.): Enabling usage of DSPs, PRUs, FPGAs, Cortex-M3s, Arduinos, MSP430 launchpads and other attached processing platforms. Scripting libraries and web interfaces: Improving the Bonescript JavaScript library, web-based interface libraries, examples or alternatives in other languages. Frameworks for open-hardware projects: Consolidating support for simplified home manufacturing (CNC, 3D printers, laser cutters, pick-and-place machines, etc.), drones/bots (ROS, IMU, video streaming, etc.) or other common tasks. Optimizations to existing userspace applications/libraries: Optimizations to applications and libraries like XBMC to make them run better on resource constrained environments or to take advantage of more specialized processing elements.

SYSFS entries for IIO and PWM
IIO and PWM provide mechanisms for sampling touch screens, performing general purpose A/D conversions to read sensors, generating voltage levels and driving motors. The Linux kernel SYSFS mechanism provides a simplified mechanism for userspace applications to set parameters and read/write data values.

Goal: Push patches to Linux mainline providing SYSFS entries for IIO and PWM useful for building a demo robot Existing project: http://github.com/beagleboard/kernel Hardware skills: Able to read schematics, understand basic digital logic and monitor logic-level digital signals Software skills: Able to write software in C, create patches to the Linux kernel and perform cross-compilation Possible mentors: TBD

PRU upstreaming
Remove HWMOD dependency requirement for PRU along with adding device tree bindings so it can be upstreamed into Linux's tree.

Goal: Push patches to Linux mainline providing support for the AM335x PRU Existing project: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/ Hardware skills: Able to read schematics, understand basic digital logic and monitor logic-level digital signals Software skills: Able to write software in C, create patches to the Linux kernel and perform cross-compilation Possible mentors: TBD

PRU firmware loader
Allow "firmware" which are really compile PRU applications to be loaded directly on PRU cores and executed using the request_firmware functionality of the Linux Kernel. This should also be Cape Manager to load PRU cape specific applications.

Ideal workflow:


 * Cape detected that uses the PRU
 * Setup pinmux
 * Find the respective firmware file for PRU core (or both cores) /lib/firmware/cape_A020_pru0.bin
 * Load onto PRU and begin execution.

Goal: Push patches to Linux mainline providing support to loading firmware on PRU cores and executing Existing project: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/ Hardware skills: Able to read schematics, understand basic digital logic and monitor logic-level digital signals Software skills: Able to write software in C, create patches to the Linux kernel and perform cross-compilation Possible mentors: Matt Ranostay, Matt Porter

PRU virtual machine
Based on Chris Roger's URAPI work to provide a virtual machine for typical Arduino functions that can be accessed from LabView, build a virtual machine to enable PRU programming from Bonescript. The virtual machine is a simple interpreter that loops over the command to perform delay, pinMode, attachInterrupt, analogRead, analogWrite, digitalRead and digitalWrite functions. A simple conditional goto is resolved at load-time and a minimal set of variables are available for use. Support will need to be included for simple expressions, but the pre-parser can break them down ahead of time. Introspection in JavaScript should be used to convert a minimal function definition into source to be fed to a parser and passed to the interpreter on the PRU via shared memory.

Goal: Implement a URAPI interpreter that off-loads hard real-time tasks from Bonescript onto the PRU and include that in the Bonescript project Existing projects: http://github.com/beagleboard/am335x_pru_package, http://github.com/jadonk/bonescript, Chris' Arduino implementation Hardware skills: Able to read schematics, understand basic digital logic and monitor logic-level digital signals Software skills: Able to write software in JavaScript and assembly Possible mentors: Jason Kridner

Android under Angstrom
Some people want to play Angry Birds or run other Android apps on their BeagleBoard/BeagleBone. Of course, you could use the Rowboat Android project as-is, but then you'd have to give up all of their typical Linux/X11 applications available in Angstrom. This project would use an Android-enabled kernel and a combination of both Angstrom and Android file systems. The input and display methods required for Android would need to be adjusted to run in on a virtual terminal and chroot/chvt would be used to invoke the various user space windows.

This has essentially been done once as part of Always Innovating's Super-Jumbo demo running Ubuntu, Angstrom, ChromeOS and Android simultaneously. The fundamental challenge is getting it reproducible and integrated into the OpenEmbedded build system for Angstrom and then starting to minimize the wasted file space by sharing libraries. Eventually, even making Android applications run in a window is desired.

Goal: Run Android applications under Angstrom and toggle back-and-forth using CTRL-ALT-Fn key presses. Existing projects: http://arowboat.org, http://www.angstrom-distribution.org Hardware skills: Minimal Software skills: Able to write software in C and Java, experience with X11 and Android Possible mentors: TBD

=Mentors=

Previous mentors