Getting started with the BBAI under 5.10

General Discussion
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1

Following the suggestion on the Beagleboard website I have flashed the latest image which appears to be am57xx-eMMC-flasher-debian-12.2-iot-armhf-2023-10-07-4gb.img. After initially struggling I managed to connect by USB tethering via an Ubuntu virtual box (Windows device manage detects it but does load a driver), now that I aware that the old serial driver has been removed and subsequently configure Wi-Fi.

What I currently struggling with is getting overlays to work. The guides that I have come across seem to based of the older 4.14 kernel that does not support overlays. I have some experience with overlays for Sunxi based boards running Armbian but ultimately new to the world of Embedded SOCs.

In this latest image there only appears to just a couple of overlays for the Am572x used on the BeagleBone AI, which look like the focus on the PRU units. Most of the overlays for activating interfaces such as SPI seemed to be for the Am3xx used by the BeagleBone black.

I have attempted to create an overlay based off BB-SPIDEV-00A0.dts and tried altering the values based on those in the I could see in the manual. Unfortunately, this seems to brick the board and I have to re-flash the image to the EMMC again. I would be grateful for an examples or guidance.

BBAI-SPIDEV2-00A0.dts (1.9 KB)

2

My recommendation is to boot from a microSD card!
If the image no longer starts due to a faulty overlay, simply put the card into an external card reader on the PC and remove the faulty oberlay by editing “/boot/uEnv.txt”!

Unfortunately I can’t help you with overlays, so far I have always edited the am5729-beagleboneai.dts directly!
On my BeagleBone AI for example I got the McSPI-3 interface to work with the attached patch (which certainly still needs some improvement):

git clone https://openbeagle.org/beagleboard/BeagleBoard-DeviceTrees.git -b v5.10.x-ti-unified
cd BeagleBoard-DeviceTrees/
patch -p0 < am5729-beagleboneai_DT_5.10_mcspi3.patch
make
sudo mv /boot/dtbs/`uname -r`/am5729-beagleboneai.dtb /boot/dtbs/`uname -r`/am5729-beagleboneai.dtb.orig
sudo cp -i src/arm/am5729-beagleboneai.dtb /boot/dtbs/`uname -r`/am5729-beagleboneai.dtb

Used Pins:
P8_20: spi3_sclk 
P8_24: spi3_d0 SDO 
P8_25: spi3_d1 SDI 
P8_05: spi3_cs0
P8_06: spi3_cs1

GPIO pins can be configured with the config-pin tool, which seems to be missing in the 12.x image. That’s why I simply grabbed the binary from an older 11.x image!

am5729-beagleboneai_DT_5.10_mcspi3.patch (7,7 KB)