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Hardware support

While BeagleG currently is tied to the BeagleBone Black am335x CPU family utilizing its neat PRU, it can support various hardware that wire up the outputs to stepmotor drivers.

There are various BeagleBone-Black capes that provide such stepper motor drivers for 3D printers and CNC machines.

This directory contains sub-directories with the name of the particular hardware. Each directory contains the necessary hardware description used by BeagleG. You need to enable the hardware you intend to use in the toplevel Makefile.

  • BUMPS/ The BUMPS board was initially developed for BeagleG before there were any other boards available.
  • CRAMPS/ The CRAMPS board by Charles Steinkuehler is a popular cape.
  • Pockegotion Work in progress for a cape for the PocketBeagle.

(If you have access to other boards and run them with BeagleG, consider adding the support and send a pull request)

Set up the pins needed

Load the pin-mapping with the config-pin script from the directory that contains your hardware mapping; for BUMPS, this would be:

/opt/source/bb.org-overlays/tools/beaglebone-universal-io/config-pin -f BUMPS/bumps.pins

(Note: Older versions of this documentation were loading a device tree here, but these days things are simpler making use of the beaglebone-universal-io GPIO pin-mapper.)

Adding support for new hardware

To add support for a new cape, you need to create a subdirectory with the name of the cape you want to add.

The directory should contain at least a README or README.md describing the board and provide references where it can be found.

Provide a *.pins file for the pin-mapping to be loaded with config-pin.

In order to make things compile, each hardware subdirectory requires the following files with these exact names:

  • beagleg-pin-mapping.h: mapping of GPIO pins to logical pins (e.g. MOTOR_1_STEP). As an example, see the BUMPS beagleg-pin-mapping.h

  • pru-io-routines.hp: a file containing a set of PRU subroutines to set certain values. You can write this file yourself or just use the generic version provided in this directory:

    cd hardware  # Where this README.md is; subdirectory of the beagleg/ toplevel dir
cp template-pru-io-routines.hp MyCapeName/pru-io-routines.hp

You can enable compilation for your new cape by setting the variable BEAGLEG_HARDWARE_TARGET in the toplevel Makefile to your cape name:

 BEAGLEG_HARDWARE_TARGET=MyCapeName

Please check out the existing subdirectories to get an idea. If you added a new board, consider sending a patch.