Developing BeagleBone Blue APIs

Hello everyone,

I’m a first year student of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Russia. I have found BeagleBoard in the GSoC organisations list and it really appeals me. I didn’t have experience in writing such a low level project, but I think, I can learn quite fast. I have skills in C++ (and using Qt, some simple games were written), C and assembler (NASM, some Arm experience). Recently, I have written a small processor emulator and assembler for it in C (hoping, this spots me in a good light) and I feel that I can bring something into such a project.

It will be great, if someone could help me with sorting this out.
Thanks,
Aleksandr Artemenkov.

Did anything appeal to you on the ideas page? Did you look at projects from previous years and see how you can improve or complete them, or simply be inspired by them?

Yes, I feel very excited about developing interfaces as it requires not only writing at low-level part but designing a comfortable set of commands for users as well. As I see, such devices as BeagleBoard Blue require attention. I have also checked the last year ideas and was interested by bootloader development. The problems to be solved in both of this projects have some common points, so I will be glad to develop any project of this type.
I’ve begun to study driver development today, so I think, I will clarify objectives by the end of the week.

What about the BeaglBone Blue do you see requiring attention? What specifically would you propose working on? The more details the better.

Sorry for the delay, I’ve faced with some problems. But now I’ve brought something interesting to you.

I saw the topic on GSoC about writing drivers and interfaces for servos and sensors. But after I visited StrawsonDesign on Git, I’ve noticed that many of them are already implemented. If so, there is no real need to perform big changes to the code.
Nevertheless, I’ve got an interesting idea: what if we create something like “Healthcare Cape” API? I haven’t find any unified open-source libraries allowing to work with medical appliances easily. For example, we can make the set of tools for users to implement different health-monitoring devices with comfort. As I see, nowadays smartphones are sometimes used for such purposes, but it is obvious that their hardware interfaces are not designed for this. With the low price of BB and it’s functionality we can provide a great systematised open-source toolset with no analogues.

At the moment I’m doing some research on medical devices we can use as modules for BB. Recently, I think of a tonometer, thermometer and blood glucose meter (the last one is complicated, may be replaced with something more simple at the start phase). I’m going to talk about possible devices with people from biology, medicine and chemistry departments of our university, as I’ve heard they are using some kind of interfaces there.

I hope, I’ve supplied you with some food for thought today.