PocketBeagle 2

Overview

PocketBeagle 2 is a computational platform powered by a TI AM6254 SoC.

(NOTE: Rev A0 used a TI AM6232 SoC and is no longer available. Rev A1 uses a TI AM6254 SoC.)

See the PocketBeagle 2 Product Page for details.

Hardware

PocketBeagle 2 features the TI AM62x SoC based around an Arm Cortex-A53 multicore cluster with an Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller, Imagination Technologies AXE-1-16 graphics processor and TI programmable real-time unit subsystem microcontroller cluster coprocessors.

Additionally, PocketBeagle 2 also contains an MSPM0L1105 SoC which serves as EEPROM and ADC.

Zephyr is enabled to run on:

  • Arm Cortex-A53 cores on AM62x,

  • Arm Cortex-M4F core on AM62x, and

  • Arm Cortex-M0+ core on MSPM0L1105.

Currently supported PocketBeagle 2 revisions:

  • A0: Comes with SOC AM6232. Discontinued.

  • A1: Comes with SOC AM6254

Supported Features

The pocketbeagle_2 board supports the hardware features listed below.

on-chip / on-board
Feature integrated in the SoC / present on the board.
2 / 2
Number of instances that are enabled / disabled.
Click on the label to see the first instance of this feature in the board/SoC DTS files.
vnd,foo
Compatible string for the Devicetree binding matching the feature.
Click on the link to view the binding documentation.

Devices

System Clock

This board configuration uses a system clock frequency of 400 MHz.

DDR RAM

The board has 512MB of DDR RAM available. This board configuration allocates Zephyr 4kB of RAM (only for resource table: 0x9CC00000 to 0x9CC00400).

Serial Port

A53 Cores

This board configuration uses single serial communication channel with the MAIN domain UART (MAIN_UART6, i.e. debug port).

M4F Core

This board configuration uses a single serial communication channel with the MCU domain UART (MCU_UART0, i.e. P2.05 as RX and P2.07 as TX).

SD Card

A53 Cores

Download BeagleBoard.org’s official BeagleBoard Imaging Utility to create bootable SD-card with the Zephyr image. Optionally, the Zephyr SD Card images can be downloaded from bb-zephyr-images.

M4F Core

Download BeagleBoard.org’s official BeagleBoard Imaging Utility to create bootable SD-card with the Linux distro image. This will boot Linux on the A53 application cores. These cores will then load the Zephyr binary on the M4 core using remoteproc.

MSPM0L1105

Download BeagleBoard.org’s official BeagleBoard Imaging Utility to create bootable SD-card with the Linux distro image. This will boot Linux on the A53 application cores. We can then flash MSPM0L1105 firmware from Linux using BSL over I2C. The BeagleBoard.org distro images ship with a driver that supports Firmware Upload API for MSPM0L1105.

Flashing

A53 Core

The testing requires the binary to be copied to the BOOT partition in SD card.

To test the A53 core, we build the Hello World sample with the following command.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b pocketbeagle_2/am6254/a53 samples/hello_world

We now copy this binary onto the SD card in the /boot/ directory and name it as zephyr.bin.

# Mount the SD card at sdcard for example
sudo mount /dev/sdX sdcard
# copy the bin to the /boot/
sudo cp --remove-destination zephyr.bin sdcard/boot/zephyr.bin

The SD card can now be used for booting.

The binary will run and print Hello world to the debug port.

M4F Core

The board supports remoteproc using the OpenAMP resource table.

The testing requires the binary to be copied to the SD card to allow the A53 cores to load it while booting using remoteproc.

To test the M4F core, we build the Hello World sample with the following command.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b pocketbeagle_2/am6254/m4 samples/hello_world

This builds the program and the binary is present in the build/zephyr directory as zephyr.elf.

We now copy this binary onto the SD card in the /lib/firmware directory and name it as am62-mcu-m4f0_0-fw.

# Mount the SD card at sdcard for example
sudo mount /dev/sdX sdcard
# copy the elf to the /lib/firmware directory
sudo cp --remove-destination zephyr.elf sdcard/lib/firmware/am62-mcu-m4f0_0-fw

The SD card can now be used for booting. The binary will now be loaded onto the M4F core on boot.

The binary will run and print Hello world to the MCU_UART0 port.

MSPM0L1105

Note

On PocketBeagle 2 MSPM0L1105 is used as EEPROM and ADC. So flashing any custom firmware will break this functionality.

Note

Flashing new firmware will also clear the EEPROM contents. So please make backup of EEPROM data before attempting to flash firmware to MSPM0L1105.

Note

Zephyr by default uses P1.19 and P1.21 as UART RX and TX respectively.

To test the MSPM0L1105, we build the Minimal footprint sample with the following command.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b pocketbeagle_2/mspm0l1105 samples/basic/minimal

This builds the program and the binary is present in the build/zephyr directory as zephyr.bin.

We now flash this binary using FW Upload API.

echo 1 > /sys/class/firmware/mspm0l1105/loading
dd if=zephyr.bin of=/sys/class/firmware/mspm0l1105/data
echo 0 > /sys/class/firmware/mspm0l1105/loading

Debugging

M4F Core

The board supports debugging M4 core from the A53 cores running Linux. Since the target needs superuser privilege, OpenOCD needs to be launched separately for now:

sudo openocd -f board/ti_am625_swd_native.cfg

Start debugging

west build -b pocketbeagle_2/am6254/m4
west debug

MSPM0L1105

Before beginning to debug, the devicetree overlay k3-am62-pocketbeagle2-mspm0swd.dtbo needs to be applied to enable the SWD pins. This can be done by adding the following entry to /boot/firmware/extlinux/extlinux.conf:

label msmp0
    kernel /Image.gz
    append console=ttyS2,115200n8 earlycon=ns16550a,mmio32,0x02860000 root=/dev/mmcblk1p3 ro rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes resume=/dev/mmcblk1p2 rootwait net.ifnames=0
    fdtdir /
    fdtoverlays /overlays/k3-am62-pocketbeagle2-mspm0swd.dtbo

After saving changes to /boot/firmware/extlinux/extlinux.conf, this boot entry can be selected using one of the following ways:

  • Setting it as default entry in /boot/firmware/extlinux/extlinux.conf.

  • Selecting the entry over UART in the bootmenu.

The board supports debugging MSPM0L1105 from the A53 cores running Linux. Since OpenOCD shipped with Zephyr does not support sysfsgpio driver, OpenOCD needs to be launched separately for now:

openocd -f board/beagle/pocketbeagle_2/support/mspm0l1105.cfg

Start debugging

west build -b pocketbeagle_2/mspm0l1105
west debug

Note

The MSPM0 ADC EEPROM firmware shipped by default disables SWD debugging. So for the above instructions to work, a firmware that enables SWD debugging needs to be flashed. This can be done by using linux FW UPLOAD API exposed at /sys/class/firmware/mspm0l1105.

Alternatively, one can get the same effect by doing a power-on-reset on the MSPM0l1105.

References