Can anyone offer any insight into how this works? In general for all embedded dev you typically have hardware (for the sake of discussion lets say a Ethernet or LCD module), drivers for the specific hardware, a way to hook it into the OS if you are using one (or a graphics/windows library) and finally a way to call at a higher level methods to run the hardware. I received a 4D systems display with my beagleboard and it magically works. If I plug it into the headers on the board and power it on then the display works. If I disconnect it and use the onboard HDMI connector then magically the video shows up on my monitor. For Ethernet you can have a processor with an on-board MAC and external PHY or a module that uses SPI/Serial for example. Those are two very different methods of connecting Ethernet but magically in the demos for development boards it all works and you use libraries at a much higher level to create sockets, communicate, handle requests etc. While I have been able to find a lot regarding TCP/IP stacks, graphics libraries, and wiring diagrams for modules I have not been able to find much that explains this "magic" I did find that the board I have has a EEPROM on it that as part of the BeagleBoard firmware it will question what the cape is and wire up the driver to the display output (frame buffer?) I don't think this is necessarily specific to just the BeagleBone, since in development you are always trying to mix together hardware/modules/processors/Operating Systems/Bare Metal code. My question is there any good books/documentation/web sites/tutorials that show in more detail how you take a piece of hardware, a processer and optionally an operating system and get them working together? But more on the details of the magic and not hey look here is a LCD, plug it in here and write this python script and bam you got a picture? If I had a FPGA that implemented a MAC and had an external PHY and connected it to the Beaglebone Black or other processor running a TCP/IP stack how would I go about telling the OS or library this is the physical communication piece and here is the driver to run it? I know there has to be some "hooks" somewhere to connect the pieces it is just not clear where they are. On a PIC32 dev board I worked with you had to tell it which MAC/PHY driver you wanted to use by using #defines. It would include the code but I believe it was all a standard interface that each driver implemented. So the stack would just call methods/functions at the lowest level and this driver would do the actual sending/receiving of bits. There has to be a book(s) that explain the magic better. Correct me if I am wrong but the general concept is the same across all types of systems whether you are using Debian, a RTOS or a stack on bare metal. The higher level abstracts the hardware/functionality to an interface and you write the code for this interface so it communicates with whatever specific hardware/communication protocol you are using?
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