Should I go on with angstrom: A specific use case

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1

Hi,

I've been playing with BBB since a week and I'm quite happy generally.

I have some specific needs, did some google searches but couldn't find
anything useful so I decided to ask here.

1. I have a Python application that access and reads some data from a
HID device (Tested, works)
2. I need to simultaneously flicker 2 LEDs (15-16Hz, not much) through
GPIO using transistors
3. I may need to use the PRU for offloading the LED part if Python +
switching LEDs hog the CPU (Which was sometimes the case in Raspberry
Pi)
4. I don't need HDMI or any other physical capes.
5. (Problem*) I need scipy which needs BLAS and ATLAS. Those libraries
needs a fortran compiler but no fortran compiler is available in
angstrom repositories. Any suggestions?

Is this use-case OK for another distro with much more packages like
debian or ubuntu? Are they stable enough?

Thanks a lot.

2

Try installing scipy using python-pip, which is available in opkg. It takes a lot of memory, though.

Eric Westphal

3

Your problem may very well be python. As far as performance goes Python is one of if not the worst scripting languages.

For the PRU you’re going to need the PRU specific assembler.

As far as distro, you may very well find a fortran compiler on another distro. I do not have my BBB running at the moment to do and apt cache search( debian ) otherwise I would do that for you.

4

Hi again,

Well I can't install scipy from pip as the build fails because of
missing BLAS and ATLAS libraries.

Well regarding Python, it is actually not at all :slight_smile: If you use it for
scientific computing using numpy/scipy, it is actually quite
sufficient :slight_smile: