Behold! Despite FedEx trying very hard to just take it and keep it for themselves, I now have a tiny weird computer. It is running RISC-V and the RISC-V has an FPGA in it. This means this computer has more Freedom than other computers. The RISC-V/FPGA microchip is made by a company named "Microchip" which sounds fake.
Either this will enable me to do strange and beautiful things, or I will waste ~2 months on trying to install Linux on it unsuccessfully then sigh and put it in a drawer.
Anyway when they shipped this to me they sent it in an antistatic bag inside of a box inside of a larger antistatic bag. Is that safe? Won't the two antistatic bags cancel out to create simply a static bag? Please don't reply to this post
In the intent of coming up with a name for my [Tiny single board computer with reprogrammable gateware fabric]. Obviously, before you install Linux on a machine , you have to think of what you're going to name it.
My original plan was "Cabbit", and nobody came up with a better suggestion and one person did recommend Ryo-Ohki, so "Cabbit" it is. "Max" was a strong contender tho.
I cannot tell if the problem is that this device has a seriously grody and misconceived setup, or my expectations are bad, or I'm just bad at computers. Look at this.
So the device has an advertised "USB-C— Power & Connectivity". I naively assumed this would be how I'd flash the initial image/gateware.
No. So first off, flashing the eMMC (the hard drive) is done by… a ribbon cable attached to this specific pin header, over which you talk serial. This is the only way. Wait, what?? They do not recommend a device to use to convert the UART to USB.
Other Beagle boards seem to have to the option to boot off the external SD card (the Fire has a slot for it).
The gateware, on the other hand, the docs only document how to do this with… a $100 proprietary programmer. That's comparable to the price of the device itself.
I guess I assumed I could flash the gateware from like, the device itself. Maybe that's possible but not documented yet? Or maybe you need the programmer to program it the first time?
So now I appear to need two separate external devices, one of which I might have to literally build? to get this to boot.
@mcc you can technically boot it without, but I think you'll save yourself a massive amount of time if you have a flashpro on hand. welcome to the world of microsemi
@violator When I needed to work with an STM microcontroller there was a $5 knockoff replacement for the controller on aliexpress. Is this likely to be the case with the Microchip flasher?
(With Altera I did buy the official one because I was repeatedly warned the unofficial ones often use the wrong voltage and fry the board.)
@mcc I've never tried with a knockoff flashpro, I'm not intimate enough with their configuration protocol to give you any guarantees, fortunately have been able to remain ignorant on that front. I had a beagle V fire and just shipped it to a friend as I didn't have the time to work on it
@mcc I will note that when I first got it and started going through it, I knew I had to go in with the same perspective I had when I inherited board designs from others at work, given the state of documentation
@violator yeah i'd say uh… "this is a hobbyist/'fixing things is fun!' project so we aren't going to build out the documentation to the level of quality on our other products" is uh… not what I'd hope for, but definitely doesn't surprise me the way the UART jumper thing does
@mcc I guess I would also conceptualize this less as a sbc and more as a dev kit for the latest SoC in the polarfire line, for people primarily interested in what polarfire has to offer. Which means beagle has a lot of work cut out for them if they want to bring the dev environment close to what the other beagleboards have
@violator Hm, I guess, it's just that Beagle does have some user friendly devices and this one looks similar and supports some of the same peripherals, so I kinda assumed it would be analagous to the existing ones (and because I'm not that strong on hardware dev, this is part of why I chose to buy this device and not one of the comparable "pure" fpga devboards).
@mcc Dealing with actel, then microsemi, then microchip, I wouldn't say reverse engineering is usually needed on the more common igloo/smartfusion lines, but you sure gotta read the documentation closely. This latest risc-v polarfire variant however seems/feels like they haven't finished the documentation even, and they roped beagle into helping them
@violator I see. Alarming, but good to know. I've been doing my other FPGA dev on an Analogue Pocket which is a very weird device and I was hoping this one would be more normalized due the presence of an actual operating system lol
@violator They have instructions on how to install a prebuilt image, but I have not yet found the link to the prebuilt image. Most likely it's on like page 11 of the documentation and I haven't read that far yet, or maybe it's linked in the Discord.
@violator I've been trying to avoid having to actually learn Tcl by writing all my designs in a Python DSL and so far it [avoiding learning tcl] is not totally working
@mcc when you need to script your workflow and you don't have the ability to work with non-vendor tools, tcl is the path. It's ingrained in all of the toolsets, no matter how much some vendors want to push you away from it. (Even when the tcl interface is far more useful than their GUI flow)
@violator Yeah, I know, I've been working with Altera :(
Unfortunately however Altera doesn't seem to really document, per se, their TCL interfaces. They seem to want you to generate the TCL with "megafunctions"
UPDATE: Sorry. I said they don't recommend a usb-to-uart bridge but they do https://www.adafruit.com/product/5335 So i guess I'm just uh… running jumper cables from that thing directly into a pin header… I've got the crabby grabby jumper cables but not a pin header that size. Gonna have to make one or more trips to the parts store I guess? :|
I dunno, I just sorta expected I wouldn't be required to handmake a cable to boot a computer. Thought single-board computers were past that point.
@mcc i feel like RISC-V hardware is really big honking embedded microcontroller pretending to be small microcomputer. the connection between system console
and HDMI port evolved as mimicry to entice buyers and never fully formed
@flyingsaceur I will run Linux on a microcontroller. That's okay. I've done it before. And this thing doesn't actually have an HDMI port.
(The Colorlight has an HDMI port but I think you're supposed to just run your own arbitrary pinout data over it rather than connecting it to a monitor)
@mcc this is actually the Libre Renegade Elite 3399, an ARM64 board that had the same bonkers boot from first principles as the StarFive Vision2 RISC-V board
@grumpasaurus@mcc oh damn, that takes me back. How many cartoons did I watch as a kid, whine for/get the toys, and forget about when the show was quietly cancelled 1.5 seasons later?
@grumpasaurus@mcc WHY DO WE KEEP ON MAKING THESE SUPERGUNS? Their only function is "evil masterminding", and we keep on dropping them into the evil mastermind's hands.
UPDATE 2: Now that I've made Discord contact, I'm adding this for the benefit of anyone who finds this thread by searching: The "real" getting started documentation is this video
and something important neither the regular documentation nor video make clear is that if you plug the BeagleV-Fire with the default-shipping onboard Linux into a PC and wait one minute, it will add itself to the PC as an Ethernet adapter and serial port (with interfaces from 0:35 in video).
Notes on above post: The effect I describe, of the BeagleV-Fire becoming these different devices, worked when I plugged it into a Linux PC but not when I plugged it into a Windows PC. Windows gave a popup like "setting up your BeagleBone", then did nothing. Also a person in the Discord who may be the product designer(?) suggested it should also show up as a flash drive, but this worked for me on neither Linux nor Windows. Whatever, that's a mystery I'll solve later. By myself.
What I'm now trying to figure out: The Discord and product documentation suggest the Fire USB-C outlet is "USB OTG", which apparently is a standard for cellphones that allow one plug to act in both USB Device and Host modes simultaneously. So it seems there ought to be some magic device, or hub, I can buy where I plug into the Fire at one end and at the other separately plug into (1) power, (2) USB to a Host the Fire appears as a Device to, and (3) USB to one or more Devices used by the Fire.
@hazmeister That's interesting, but those are USB micro and I have USB-C. I suppose I could slip on a C-to-micro adapter? But that might change something…
@hazmeister Thank you! You seem to have found the search query I could not.
Several people familiar with the USB spec have claimed to me that there is no such thing as OTG on USB C and USB C instead has a equivalent feature called DRD. I wonder if these devices are doing DRD and calling it OTG because that's what consumers know it as, or if they're out of spec, or what the heck.
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