I recently made several improvements to the community Beaglebone BSP available on Codeplex.

The BSP now support all three serial communication ports. These ports are 2-wire (Rx and TX only) and available on the expansion P9 connector. Also added support for the third instance of the SDHC controller. These, along with the I2C and SPI bus are also available on the expansion connectors. I have included managed (C#) test programs to exorcise these buses. 

Added a define file for the TPS65217 PMIC (Power Management IC). This PMIC has some nice features, like built in LCD backlight support and a Li battery charger. I have battery support working and will release additional code soon. Support for WEC7 and WEC2013.   

DV

Windows Embedded Compact 2013 (WEC2013) has great graphics and the XMAL /Silverlight support makes it great for User Interface (UI) development. With WEC 2013 many of the traditional user shell components, like the control panel, have been removed. This shifts most of the UI burden back on the OS developer. Not to worry though, there are some great samples included with WEC2013 and the development tools are now top notch. Here is an example of a home screen and the control panel included in WEC7 but removed in WEC2013: And here is an example of a home screen included as sample code in WEC 2013: You can clearly see the improvements. One additional nice feature of the new graphics framework is its ability to support “hardware acceleration”. Most all the new PCs graphic cards do some form of hardware acceleration and now even the lower-end embedded Systems On a Chip (SOC’s) include graphics accelerators or GPUs. The Beagleboard Black, which contains a Texas Instruments AM335X processor, is no excepti ...

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In my last blog post I showed how to transfer IoT data over the network using the M2MQTT library. But how, you may ask, do you acquire the data in the first place? Well, chances are you have some kind of sensor, be it temperature, pressure, accelerometer or what have you. These sensors, more than likely, interface to the IoT node processor via some kind of bus. It could be I2C, SPI, CAN, LIN or any number of others in the alphabet soup. By far the two most popular low level sensor buses are I2C and SPI. I2C stands for Inter-Integrated Circuit and was invented by Philips Semiconductor (now NXP Semiconductor), SPI stand for Serial Peripheral Interface invented by Motorola. In this example I will show how we can interface to these buses using managed code (C#) in Visual Studio 2013. I will use the BeagleBone Black as the platform running Windows Embedded Compact 2013. A prebuilt demo image is available at my Codeplex site along with all the source code for the example. To start I wired a prototyp ...

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