BeagleY-AI USB Port Fails To Initialize

General Discussion
1

Hi,

I read that sometimes when the BeagleY-AI boots the USB port doesn’t come up as planned.

Is is possible to avoid this issue completely by ensuring that a good quality power supply (capacity to supply plenty of current) and good quality (low resistance) USB lead are used or should other precautions be taken to avoid this? (We’re planning to use the Texas Instruments Edge AI image.)

If using a good quality power supply and USB lead aren’t enough to avoid this issue, what other steps can be taken?

When this issue occurs would power cycling the USB chipset help resolve it? (Sorry I haven’t looked into the data sheets for the USB chipset for the BeagleY-AI in detail yet.)

Where power-up and power-down of the BeagleY-AI can be controlled by a separate MCU would a viable workaround to this problem be for the MCU to boot the BeagleY-AI, check to see if the USB port has come up correctly and - if the USB port hasn’t come up correctly - restart the BeagleY-AI

Original source:

”USB on BeagleY-AI is presently unreliable and often fails to initialize. This issue also impacts Beagleboard Debian. You may observe the USB mouse or camera not being detected.

If you hit this issue, try rebooting the device.”

I had a look here

but couldn’t find anything so wasn’t sure what the situation is.

Any thoughts folk have would be great!

Will

2

So much BS on the internet by those with an agenda or don’t have a clue in the world of what is going on.

Your best solution is to test the board with your setup, if it works fine then more than likely the problem is nothing but internet BS.

3

Our application has to work in the field for extended periods without human intervention so it’s important for us to get an idea of how frequently other users experience this problem, what some of the underlying risk factors might be and whether the solutions or workarounds we’re looking at will be likely to be effective or not.

Overall, I think the workarounds we’re looking at should be enough but it’s also important to get opinions from people with more experience of this problem - perhaps precautions like ensuring a good quality power supply and USB lead can eliminate this problem completely?

The documentation on beagleboard.org is very high quality and the Using Edge AI article that I quoted above is a very well written and insightful document.

4

I added that message. I assume some extra retries in the USB driver works around whatever boot timing issue there is.

Details here:

5

Thanks!

I can understand potential boot timing issues - so many IP subunits have to come up in the right order to power up a chip this complicated and if the timing isn’t exactly right there could be the risk of unexpected conflicts…

Could we help at all by testing it on our BeagleY-AI board here or by sending you a new BeagleY-AI board?

6

Sure, go ahead and see if you can reproduce the USB failures on your board. There are some notes in the Discord message I linked to above about what to look for. I’m not working on USB right now but it would be great to have a fix for the image.