jasteve4
commented
9 years ago This sounds like a good place for new people to get some experience with embedded systems. That being said, the interface between bone and the microcontroller can be fleshed out at a later time. The most important part of the initial design is the peripherals of the cape. For example:
number of pwm channels, number of GPIO channels, number of ADC channels, etc.
Knowing this is a good first step. Also it is good to know the amount of power that the cape and the peripherals will require.
The idea that I have here is basically a simplified version of the senior design project we proposed (#244).
Instead of necessarily dealing with motors, it would just give the beaglebone control of its pins. It would have an I2C interface where the Beaglebone sends commands like
Pin 10 | mode | GPIO.pin 10 | direction | in.Or maybe a simplified protocol as this idea is more fleshed out.
As a base goal it could involve something like just GPIOs, and later on we could expand it to involve other functions. (PWM is another one we'd be interested in).
The reason this is important would be because of issues like #303 that demonstrate just how strange dealing with low level hardware on the beaglebone can be, and having an MSP430 expansion cape would help to remove a lot of that load.