Good afternoon/evening to all,
My name is Aleksandar Lazarov, please call me Aleks, and I’m a third-year student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies in Skopje, Macedonia. I’m studying in the program Electronics, Radio Engineering and Signal Processing.
I’m interested in participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code, more exactly, participate in the BeagleBoard community. Why ? Well, I consider myself to be a hardware hacker, and anything regarding Open Hardware and Open Software just makes my day.
I’m a member of the Free Software Macedonia NGO[1] and also a member of the only hackerspace in Macedonia - KIKA[2], where I’m the only hardware related guy there.
I have a good knowledge in the C and C++ programing languages, as I mostly write software for embedded devices (Arduino mostly). I’m a GNU/Linux user for almost 8 years now, and I’m familiar with Linux itself, the development of FLOSS software, and the GNU/Linux programing environment and it’s setup (compiler, linker, debugger, Autotools, Make etc…). I’m also an Arduino user/maker, making electronics for it and programing it.
I’ve read up on the Ideas page, that having an Arduino-compatible library for Linux would be a nice idea, and even adding support for the BeagleBone to the Energia fork. I think that this is an excellent idea, and would love to work on it ! In our hackerspace, we have a BeagleBoard-Mx board, but not a BeagleBone, so I will need to find one. In the meanwhile, I’m going to clone the Energia repo, and play around with the code, try it out on a MSP430 board and see how it can be “hacked” for the BeagleBone.
Great. Check out the ‘userspace’ fork at https://github.com/prpplague/Energia/tree/userspace. It currently just performs printf’s where it needs to do actual hardware interactions. I put everything into a library and created a pkg-config and simple Makefile (that did .ino to .cpp conversion), but the Arduino folks didn’t seem interested in having those changes pushed upstream. I didn’t do a super clean job of it either. Anyway, you’ll want to have some consideration of how you might build outside the IDE as well. Rebasing that fork and starting to fill in the functionality would seem to be a good way to go to me. Best to further coordinate with Dave Anders, since it is his fork.
Can anyone please be so kind to direct me on how should I proceed before the application period, what tasks do I need to complete in order for me to have a chance of acceptance in GSoC 2013 ?
Have you looked at the questionnaire at http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/beagle. Some of our mentors are still needing a bit of encouragement to get engaged with the project, but I know they have been very excellent help in the past and will do so once they feel like you can be valuable to advance the projects. Try to read up about what various people in the beagleboard.org community have done and engage them to see how you can best work with them (and me).