Beagle Play

Introduction

BeaglePlay is built around Texas Instruments AM62x Sitara™ Processors which is a Quad-Core Arm® Cortex®-A53 Human-machine-interaction SoC. It comes with 2GB DDR4 RAM, 16GB eMMC storage.

Initial Flashing procedure

Flashing Android the first time requires booting from DFU.

First, make sure to install snagboot following the official instructions

Make sure to install the udev rules as documented:

$ snagrecover --udev > 50-snagboot.rules
$ sudo cp 50-snagboot.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
$ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
$ sudo udevadm trigger

Then, the following steps are required:

  1. Make sure the board is powered down. No SD Card is present.

  2. Plug in the serial connector to view debug logs. In a terminal, open:

    $ sudo picocom -b 115200 -r -l /dev/ttyUSB0
    
  3. Hold the USR button. While holding the button, insert USB cable from PC to board.

  4. Wait for DFU mode to come up. DFU mode is a backup boot mode for the Beagle Play. To check if the device enumerates via DFU, run dfu-util -l:

    $ while [ 1 ] ; do dfu-util -l; sleep 1; done
    Found DFU: [0451:6165] ver=0200, devnum=99, cfg=1, intf=0, path="1-1", alt=1, name="SocId", serial="01.00.00.00"
    Found DFU: [0451:6165] ver=0200, devnum=99, cfg=1, intf=0, path="1-1", alt=0, name="bootloader", serial="01.00.00.00"
    
  5. Run snagrecover to load the bootloaders

    # run from out/target/product/am62x
    $ snagrecover -s am625 -f ./am625-beagleplay.yaml
    

    The debug console will show:

    Press SPACE to abort autoboot in 2 seconds
    =>
    
  6. In the debug console, hit the SPACE key to halt in U-Boot

  7. Make sure the default U-Boot environment is configured

    => env default -a -f
    => saveenv
    
  8. Start fastboot

    => fastboot usb 0
    
  9. Run the flashing script

    # run from out/target/product/am62x
    $ sudo ./flashall.sh --board am625-beagleplay
    
  10. Unplug USB power and replug to switch to normal boot mode.

Device Tree Overlays

Device Tree Overlays (DTBO) can be enabled from U-Boot when extra peripherals are connected to the board. DTBOs are board specific. To configure dtbos, reboot to the U-Boot console and set the adtbo_idx environment variable.

=> env set adtbo_idx '2'
=> saveenv

Note

Enabling multiple DTBOs is not supported.

Here is the list of adtbo_idx that is supported on Beagle Play:

Index

Description

6

Digilent PCam 5C OV5640 Camera

7

TEVI-OV5640C-S84-IR-RPI Camera

8

Lincoln Technology Solutions LCD185-101CT WUXGA(1920x1200) OLDI panel

External resources