I'm not 100% sure about the 512MB of memory, but I suspect you'd be fine after the initial setup of the memory controller.. probably best to look at the memory controller section of the technical reference manual in order to figure that out. I don't imagine you'd have to deal with any virtual addressing or anything of that sort, as long as you can simply operate without the MMU.
The interrupt driven stuff should work just as well in the same way you've done with your other microcontrollers, I wouldn't be too worried about that. I think that's pretty much how the Linux drivers work anyway, unless they are using DMA. If you really wanted to get fancy and efficient, you could also set up DMA in the bare metal to take some load off the processor. Lastly, I would imagine that you'd need the PRU to read from the camera, though you may be able to do something clever with DMA as well. It could also be worth looking at another platform that has dedicated camera hardware. Personally if I was going to do this, I would stick with Linux and Xenomai (look into Machinekit for a way of getting that all set up without having to compile your kernel since they are pre-packaging it for you!!). One thing is that Xenomai doesn't have a "real-time safe" UART driver for BBB just yet, but if you can afford some slack on the latency of UART data coming in then you could find a way to work with the regular Linux driver and there are some options on bridging the data from non-realtime domain to realtime. My reasoning is that Linux has multitasking and a lot of devices and services out of the box that you might want to use at some point (filesystems, networking, etc) and you can optionally add in other software (ROS, OpenCV, whatever you want) as you go along, which could be a lot harder to deal with in bare metal. If you have some hard requirement that forces you into bare metal, then that's another thing... Hope that helps some! -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
