This Week in Beagle #3

Hello everyone. Another light week here. Let’s go over everything.

BeaglePlay PWM Patch

A while ago, I discovered that the MikroBUS PWM pin was not enabled in the upstream devicetree for BeaglePlay. So I created a patch to enable PWM and it was finally merged last week.

BeagleConnect Freedom Debugging

Continuing the work from last week, I was able to load Zephyr firmware that exhibited the stalling behavior. However, I still haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact cause. You can follow the discussion in Ti E2E

I have created a minimal example to reproduce the problem.

BeagleBoard Rust Imager

There has been some interest in making the Rust flasher the official flasher. To achieve that, there has been a lot of development towards v1.0.0.

MacOS dmg support

Thanks to help from Zain, I was able to create MacOS dmg in CI. While most of the flashing functionality does not work on MacOS yet, having easy experimental CI builds should help development to at least ensure everything builds.

Make bb-imager-rs Ready for crates.io

While exploring ways to create a Debian package, I stumbled across debcargo, which is the official way to package Rust applications for Debian. Since it can potentially allow official packages in the future, I decided to prefer it over cargo-deb. However, since debcargo builds the package from crates.io, I needed to cleanup the out of tree patches for rs-drivelist and bin_file. So, I moved the unmerged/unreleased code into bb-imager itself for now.

I still need to set up CI to push to crates.io automatically, but I am a bit unsure regarding how to handle the API key securely.

Sd Card Formatting Support

I have added support for SD card formatting since it is helpful for an imaging utility. However, it does not work on Windows yet.

Performance Enhancements and Code improvements

Here is the list of minor improvements that occurred during the week:

  • More responsive UI
  • Make the default window size smaller
  • Better handling of big os image lists.
  • Code improvements to make contribution easier.

Ending Thoughts

This was it for this week. Hopefully, this helps bring transparency regarding where the development efforts are concentrated, and how the community can help. Look forward to next update.

Helpful links