BeagleBoard.org is just about to kick-off coding on our second time as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. This is an amazing program that pays students for writing open source software over Summer. Seven (7) students will be participating in projects that advance the state of open source software for Beagle users and will earn them each US$5,000 if they are successful. Twenty-three (23) qualified mentors from the BeagleBoard.org community have volunteered to help the students reach their goals.
Each project has a page on BeagleBoard.org giving a bit of a description of the project linked in the table below. Each of those pages in turn links to blogs where the students will update the BeagleBoard.org community on their progress. Most of the daily collaboration will be happening on the #beagle-gsoc IRC channel, including weekly status meetings, which are all being logged. The nicknames of each student and mentor are included in square brackets in the table below, so you can contact them with any feedback you might have. You might also choose to join the BeagleBoard-GSoC Google Group for related announcements and additional technical discussion on the projects.
Each of the projects is rather interesting and you’ll be able to read more about them here in the weeks to come. Scroll past the table below for a video describing one of the projects, the development of I2C drivers for the Minix operating system.
| Project | Student | Mentors (* = primary) |
|---|---|---|
| Minix I2C drivers for the BeagleBone Black | Thomas Cort (Heritage College in Canada) [tcort] | Kees Jongenburger* [keesj], Ben Gras [beng-nl], Frans Meulenbroeks [effem] |
| Arduino for userspace Linux | Anuj Deshpande (Pune Institute of Computer Technology in India) [hatguy_] and Parav Nagarsheth (Nirma University in India) [anujdeshpande] | David Anders* [prpplague], Matt Porter [mdp], Andrew Bradford [bradfa], Luis Gustavo Lira [lglira] |
| Android-based boot system | Vlad Victor Ungureanu (Jacobs University Bremen in Germany) [vvu] | Vladimir Pantelic* [av500], Tom King [ka6sox], Kees Jongenburger [keesj] |
| Software Defined Peripherals: JTAG/Debug via PRU | Jon Bailey (University of Waterloo in Canada) [jj2baile] | Tom King* [ka6sox], Andrew Bradford [bradfa], Pantelis Antoniou [panto], Hunyue Yau [ds2], Matt Ranostay [mranostay] |
| IIO, ADC, PMIC, LCD debug/patchwork | Zubair Lutfullah Kakakhel (University of Leeds in UK) [ZubairLK] | Greg Kroah-Hartman* [gregkh], Koen Kooi [koen], Vladimir Pantelic [av500], Tom Rini [Tartarus], Laine Walker-Avina [Ceriand] |
| Beagle-ROS | Víctor Mayoral Vilches (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain) [vmayoral] | Koen Kooi* [koen], Khem Raj [khem] |
One of the students has already posted a video describing their project and all of the students will eventually provide video presentations of their projects, so stay tuned if you want to be video-spoon-fed.
Thanks to Thomas for providing that video. Of course, there are several other individuals involved in supporting this year’s Summer of Code, including, but certainly not limited to:
Our mentors-at-large: Derek Molloy (general BeagleBone) [molloyd], Mans Rullgard (ARM) [mru], Karim Yaghmour (Android), Russ Dill [Russ], Jason Kridner (BeagleBoard.org GSoC administrator) [jkridner] and
Our backup administrator (and all around amazing person): Cathy Wicks [cwicks].
Thanks to everyone for their participation and support. Looking forward to an amazing Summer!
–Jason