BeagleBoard/GSoC/2021 Proposal/OmkarBhilare

Proposal for Beaglewire Software Support

About Student: Omkar Bhilare
Mentors: Michael Welling
Code: gsoc-application
Wiki: https://elinux.org/BeagleBoard/GSoC/2021_Proposal/OmkarBhilare
GSoC: GSoC entry

Status

This project is currently just a proposal.

Proposal

Completed All the requirements listed on the ideas page.
The PR request for cross-compilation task: #154.

About you

IRC: Omkar Bhilare
Github: ombhilare999
School: Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute
Country: India
Primary language : English, Hindi, Marathi
Typical work hours: 10AM-8PM Indian Standard Time
Previous GSoC participation: This is my first time applying for GSoC, I'm an Electronics enthusiast and have a great interest in fields like FPGA, Digital VLSI, Computer Architecture. I have experienced with Intel's Quartus, Xilinx's vivado, and opensource toolchains for ice40. I have also done many projects related to Cyclone2, Upduino3.0(ICE40), Sipeed Tang Primer FPGA.

About your project

Project name: Beaglewire Software Support

Description

Introduction

The BeagleWire is an FPGA development platform that has been designed for use with BeagleBone boards. BeagleWire is a cape on which there is an FPGA device (Lattice iCE40HX). The software support for BeagleWire is still in the development phase. In this project, I'm developing and testing the existing software support of Beaglewire.
The known primary issue in Beaglewire is the interface between 32MB SDRAM and ICE40HX4K. For this Solution, I'm going to try options like LiteDRAM(a small footprint and configurable DRAM core) or Advanced SDRAM controller provided by LATTICE.

Why LiteDRAM for SDRAM Control

The Core produced by LiteDRAM is
1. Fully pipelined, high performance.
2. Configurable commands depth on bankmachines.
3. Auto-Precharge.
4. Periodic refresh/ZQ short calibration (up to 8 postponed refreshes).

LiteDRAM is already used in commercial and open-source designs

Testing and Improvement of Subsystem Like I2C, SPI, PWM, UART

In this project I'm going to test all the subsystems like I2C, SPI, PWM, UART in Hardware and the primary goal will be to debug the issues related to it and fix them accordingly. Along with the driver code ready to use solutions will be added in software support.

• I2C: There are two grove Connectors on BeagleWire for I2C, I will test the current Verilog Code of I2C in hardware, and will found out if further improvements can be done or not.
  
• UART: The existing code of Uart will be tested in hardware, and few examples also will be added for UART.
• PWM: New Example will be created for testing of PWM. Servo Code will serve the purpose of testing the PWM drivers.

Others

• There are current Issues open on BeagleWire Repository, These will be solved during this project.
• More PMODs will be interfaced with the BeagleWire.
• Increase the Documentation and also add getting started guide for BeagleWire.

Details of Implementation

• First of all, I need to load a pre-prepared BBB image to beagle with existing all required drivers and scripts to start BeagleWire development.

The steps give on Quick Start Guide:
Download image:

$ wget https://rcn-ee.net/rootfs/bb.org/testing/BeagleWire/BeagleWire-image.tar.xz

Verify image:

$ sha256sum BeagleWire-image.tar.xz
eb862b8898b821627909952854688b46b93778fff4164c7c096453025ec7caeb

Unpack image and write the image to the memory card (please check if you have the correct SD card device — in my case it is /dev/sdd):

$ tar xf BeagleWire-image.tar.xz
$ sudo dd if=image.img of=/dev/sdX

• To generate the bitstream I'm going to first try the existing fpga-load script which leverages the FPGA manager, which is the core that exports a set of functions for programming an FPGA with an Image.
• LiteDRAM:
  

1. LiteDRAM provides a small footprint and configurable DRAM core. The configuration of LiteDRAM can be changed using yml input. The examples given the repository as follows:

#
# This file is part of LiteDRAM.
#
# Copyright (c) 2018-2019 Florent Kermarrec <florent@enjoy-digital.fr>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause

{
    # General ------------------------------------------------------------------
    "cpu":        "vexriscv",  # Type of CPU used for init/calib (vexriscv, lm32)
    "speedgrade": -1,          # FPGA speedgrade
    "memtype":    "DDR2",      # DRAM type
.
.
.

2. This configuration can be changed for this application that is memory type to SDRAM and CPU None:

cpu=None

• Testing of Subsystems like I2C, UART, PWM, and SPI:

1. For this I need to synthesize the Verilog code first using IceStorm Toolchains, I will be first referring to the steps mentioned in the BeagleWire Documentation: Synthesizing Verilog Code using Icestorm Toolchains

Timeline

Provide a development timeline with a milestone each of the 11 weeks and any pre-work. (A realistic timeline is critical to our selection process.)

Mar 30	Proposal complete, Submitted to https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com
Apr 27	Proposal accepted or rejected
May 18	Pre-work complete, Coding officially begins!
May 25	Milestone #1, Introductory YouTube video
June 1	Milestone #2
June 8	Milestone #3
June 15 18:00 UTC	Milestone #4, Mentors and students can begin submitting Phase 1 evaluations
June 19 18:00 UTC	Phase 1 Evaluation deadline
June 22	Milestone #5
June 29	Milestone #6
July 6	Milestone #7
July 13 18:00 UTC	Milestone #8, Mentors and students can begin submitting Phase 2 evaluations
July 17 18:00 UTC	Phase 2 Evaluation deadline
July 20	Milestone #9
July 27	Milestone #10
August 3	Milestone #11, Completion YouTube video
August 10 - 17 18:00 UTC	Final week: Students submit their final work product and their final mentor evaluation
August 17 - 24 18:00 UTC	Mentors submit final student evaluations

Experience and approach

In 5-15 sentences, convince us you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described.

Contingency

What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn’t around?

Benefit

If successfully completed, what will its impact be on the BeagleBoard.org community? Include quotes from BeagleBoard.org community members who can be found on http://beagleboard.org/discuss and http://bbb.io/gsocchat.

Misc

Please complete the requirements listed on the ideas page. Provide link to pull request.

Suggestions

Is there anything else we should have asked you?