Tims Board Farm

This is about Tim's Fuego board farm, in his home office. For general Board farm issues see Board Farm

= beaglebone black =
 * power provided by USB, mediated by Sony Debug Board
 * network via an Ethernet hub, and also via USB networking to host,
 * USB connection to host (providing network and mass storage device from the beaglebone to the host) and host providing power.
 * serial console mediated by Sony Debug Board (Sony_Debug_Assist_board)

The Sony Debug board controls the USB connection (can toggle it on and off), which also controls the power, and converts serial UART to USB serial. The Sony Debug board is connected to the host by its own USB cable, and by another cable which acts as the pass-through USB from the beaglebone to the host.


 * The firmware is uboot.
 * storage: firmware, kernel and root filesystem are on sdcard.

Control of the Sony Debug Board is via another interface over the SDB control USB cable, using character sequences to issue commands, and reading the interface as a character device to examine status (power draw, USB connection status, button connection status, etc.)

Provisioning
Project to support provisioning of the Beaglebone black to a mainline kernel:
 * https://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black#BeagleBoneBlack-Mainline

Robert Nelson's Mainline kernel tree: $ git clone https://github.com/RobertCNelson/bb-kernel $ cd bb-kernel $ git checkout origin/am33x-v4.16 -b my-bb-branch $ (or) git checkout origin/am33x-rt-v4.9 -b my-bb-rt-branch $ ./build_kernel.sh

Robert Nelson's TI BSP kernel tree: $ git clone https://github.com/RobertCNelson/ti-linux-kernel-dev.git $ cd ti-linux-kernel-dev/ $ git checkout origin/ti-linux-4.14.y -b my-ti-branch $ (or) git checkout origin/ti-linux-rt-4.14.y -b my-ti-rt-branch $ ./build_kernel.sh

= MinnowBoard (x86_64) = For the minnowboard, I wanted to preserve the original Ubuntu environment as much as possible, so I opted to not convert Grub to serial mode. Instead I decided to do USB-keyboard automation to control the grub menu on cold power start. IMHO, this simulates much more closely what an individual developer would be willing to do to their machine to use Fuego (except replacing my USB keyboard automation with their manual keyboard operation, when booting a new kernel).

See Tims minnowboard test provisioning for details.