February 22, 2023

PRU resources

The PRU in the Beaglebone is what sets it apart from every other little ARM board in the world today. Of course you don't need the PRU for many things, but it makes the impossible possible in important cases.

Significant PRU projects

The sea of segments project. 12,288 seven segment displays on a wall mounted panel. He used a "pocket beagle". He says:

"I love the way the BeagleBone has the comfort of Linux but also the programmability of the PRU and thus interfacing with the real world. With the introduction of the PocketBeagle, it felt like a no-brainer to use it for this project.

  • Sea of segments project page
  • Building the sea of segments

    -- The Gesswein MFM analyzer and emulator. For those into retrocomputing, this facilitates pulling data off of historic MFM hard drives, then emulating said drives with modern hardware. The analyzer captures transitions with 100 Mhz resolution. It doesn't actually sample data at 100 Mhz (see the next project for that), but uses a capture timer that triggers on rising edges. Nonetheless, the PRU is essential to the application.

    -- BeagleLogic 100 Mhz logic analyzer. From 2014. This works with sigrok, making it a nice sounding tool. The Beaglelogic is a "cape" that provides logic level shifting (and protection). Up to 320M samples can be captured with 8 channels.
    Note the use of a 74LVCH16T245 as a 16 channel level shifter -- a big brother to the 8 channel chip.

    Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

    Kyu / tom@mmto.org