Can I switch the beagleboard / pandaboard firmwares?

Is the firmware that gets downloaded with the targetinstaller any different from the stock linux arm image? (armel / armhf)

Can I download newer images and get simulink control my boards?

[Murat Belge]

The firmware that gets downloaded for BeagleBoard and PandaBoard are both flavors of Ubuntu 11.10. While assembling these Linux images, we installed a number of Linux packages for MathWorks tools to work properly. You can in theory be able to do the same. Following packages / utilities are needed:

1. SSH server 2. GCC / MAKE native build tools 3. ALSA development libraries and ALSA utilities (required for audio blocks) 4. SDL 1.2 development library (required for video display block) 5. V4L2 module

Here is the Linux command line for BeagleBoard installation of these packages (on top of Ubuntu 11.10 console image from http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu)

 # sudo apt-get install xfce4 gdm xubuntu-artwork xserver-xorg-video-omap3 
network-manager openssh-server openssh-client sshpass ntpdate kwrite libsdl1.2-dev konsole mplayer espeak build-essential

Note however that some features such as speak IP address (i.e. BeagleBoard / PandaBoard speaks its IP address when you press a GPIO button) will not work (this is a simple daemon that was developed in house). We also modified some settings in the Linux image. The most notable of these are:

1. Turn off reverse DNS lookup in SSH (add "UseDNS no" to /etc/ssh/sshd_config)

2. Turn off console logging in PandaBoard image

[Murat Belge]

Note however that we only test the stock Linux images available via targetinstaller and hence may not be able to help you if you encounter an issue with your custom firmware.

[Walter Roberson]

Murat, I think your comments are worth making into an Answer.

[Mark]

I attempted to follow the install instructions for 12.04. I successfully compiled the mathworks generated code, however, it does not seem to perform the update function of my model. Model initialization completes fine. I checked this by editing the generated c files and putting in debugging printf statements. Any suggestions?

[Rolfe Dlugy-Hegwer]

Mark, what do you mean by the update function? Are you talking about External mode, which lets you use the model on your host computer to update parameter values in the executable running on the BeagleBoard hardware?

[Mark]

Rolfe, I created a test model called "beagleboardTest" and this is the function that does not get called:

 /* Model update function */
void beagleboardTest_update(void)
{...}

The model is a simple model with a sine wave generator block feeding to a UDP block.

-Mark

Answer 1

[Rolfe Dlugy-Hegwer]

Hi Bharath. Thanks for asking. To answer your questions:

Q: Is the firmware that gets downloaded with the targetinstaller any different from the stock linux arm image? (armel / armhf)

A: Yes. The firmware update includes customizations that are required for some features in the support package.

Q: Can I download newer images and get simulink control my boards?

A: This approach is not tested/supported by MathWorks. If you try it and have issues, your only resource would be other members of the community.

It looks like Mark had success compiling and running a binary on a newer image, but ran into an issue with "the update function".