BeagleBone AI-64

Board Integrations Yocto Project
1

Board description

BeagleBone® AI-64 brings a complete system for developing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning solutions with the convenience and expandability of the BeagleBone® platform and the peripherals on board to get started right away learning and building applications. With locally hosted, ready-to-use, open-source focused tool chains and development environment, a simple web browser, power source and network connection are all that need to be added to start building performance-optimized embedded applications. Industry-leading expansion possibilities are enabled through familiar BeagleBone® cape headers, with hundreds of open-source hardware examples and dozens of readily available embedded expansion options available off-the-shelf.

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bbai1456×1162 401 KB

URL: BeagleBone AI-64

Test results

The Yocto Project releases in the table below have been tested by the Mender community. Please update it if you have tested this integration on other Yocto Project releases:

Yocto Project Build Runtime
kirkstone (4.0) :test_works: 1 :test_works:

1. the .sdimg.bmap image type seems to produce buggy results, using the .sdimg artifact directly is required.

Build Means that the Yocto Project build using this Mender integration completes without errors and outputs images.
Runtime Means that Mender has been verified to work on the board. For U-Boot-based boards, the integration checklist has been verified.

Getting started

Prerequisites

  • A supported Linux distribution and dependencies installed on your workstation/laptop as described in the Yocto Mega Manual
    • NOTE. Instructions depend on which Yocto version you intend to use.
  • Google repo tool installed and in your PATH.

Configuring the build

Setup Yocto environment

Set the Yocto Project branch you are building for:

# set to your branch, make sure it is supported (see table above)
export BRANCH="kirkstone"

Create a directory for your mender-beaglebone-ai64 setup to live in and clone the
meta information.

mkdir mender-beaglebone-ai64 && cd mender-beaglebone-ai64

Initialize repo manifest:

repo init -u https://github.com/mendersoftware/meta-mender-community \
           -m meta-mender-ti/scripts/manifest-ti.xml \
           -b ${BRANCH}

Fetch layers in manifest:

repo sync

Setup build environment

Initialize the build environment:

source setup-environment ti

Configure Mender server URL (optional)

This section is not required for a successful build but images that are generated by default are only suitable for usage with the Mender client in Standalone deployments, due to lack of server configuration.

You can edit the conf/local.conf file to provide your Mender server configuration, ensuring the generated images and Mender Artifacts are connecting to the Mender server that you are using. There should already be a commented section in the generated conf/local.conf file and you can simply uncomment the relevant configuration options and assign appropriate values to them.

Build for Hosted Mender:

# To get your tenant token:
#    - log in to https://hosted.mender.io
#    - click your email at the top right and then "My organization"
#    - press the "COPY TO CLIPBOARD"
#    - assign content of clipboard to MENDER_TENANT_TOKEN
#
MENDER_SERVER_URL = "https://hosted.mender.io"
MENDER_TENANT_TOKEN = "<copy token here>"

Building the image

You can now proceed with building an image:

MACHINE=beaglebone-ai64 bitbake core-image-base

Replace core-image-base with your desired image target.

Using the build output

After a successful build, the images and build artifacts are placed in tmp/deploy/images/beaglebone-ai64/.

The disk image (with .sdimg suffix) is used to provision the device storage for devices without Mender running already. Please proceed to the official documentation on provisioning a new device for steps to do this.

On the other hand, if you already have Mender running on your device and want to deploy a rootfs update using this build, you should use the Mender Artifact files, which have .mender suffix. You can either deploy this Artifact in managed mode with the Mender server (upload it under Releases in the server UI) or by using the Mender client standalone mode.

References

  • The official Mender documentation explains how Mender works. This is simply a board-specific complement to the official documentation.
  • The integration template is maintainted in the meta-mender-community repository.

Known issues

  • .sdimg.bmap support seems to be causing partition corruption. Use the .sdimg image directly, eventually after unpacking from .sdimg.bz2