Contributor
Ravi Kumar Prasad

BeagleBoot , an all in one flasher/updater


Mentors
Jason Kridner
Organization
BeagleBoard.org Foundation

Currently, the ways to flash images in BeagleBone hardware are not easy especially for beginners, SD card method takes up much time and manual configuration, BBBlfs flashing tool works but is CLI based, not much reliable and works on limited platforms, TI's Uniflash tool is also old and works only under older versions of Windows and Linux with a lot of manual configuration. The project is to port the BeagleBone bootloader server BBBlfs(currently written in c) to JavaScript(node.js) and make a cross platform GUI (using electron framework) flashing tool utilising the etcher.io project. This will allow us to have single code base for a cross platform tool.

The tool works as:

  1. TFTP transfer of SPL binary and u-boot.
  2. Utilizing the ums feature of u-boot, booting the BB hardware into USB mass storage mode.
  3. Flashing the BB hardware with etcher.io like tool.

This project project will be really helpful for everybody especially newbies, who would have a nice experience with flashing images easily and faster, so that they can focus on the more important stuff be it their robotics project, kernel development or some new PRU hack.