[elcritch]

My preferred route is the Nerves project (http://nerves-project.org). It has had support for BeagleBone’s for a long while (https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves_system_bbb).

I haven’t had a chance to try Nerves with the new BeagleBone Pocket yet. There may be an issue with using the EEPROM and the nerves flash utility fwup, though if so I’ll likely work on adding support for it myself as the Octeva SoC is pretty awesome for a lot of applications. Especially since it has support for the onboard PRU’s which come in handy for critical timing.

As for the buildchain, Nerves has a Docker based build image (on OS X) or native Linux builds both based on buildroot which you can easily customize to include the PRU build tool chain. You can include a custome make package in buildroot or Elixir dependencies. Though this route would require writing some amount of Elixir.

So if Nerves is not your cup of tea, you could checkout Yocto or even raw Buildroot or the new Ubuntu core stuff. For buildroot it’s a matter of configuring it and putting it all in a Docker image (or similar) and using `make` and it builds the firmware blobs for you.

[hinkley]

Your first link is to an elixir project by the same name

[elcritch]

Yes, Nerves is an Elixir project. Essentially it’s a wrapper around Buildroot + Elixir based runtime stack + Firmware management. Extremely convenient and could be helpful for the OP as there’s good support for Beaglebone’s, but you do need to know/write some Elixir to use it.

Though it’s entirely possible to have Elixir run say python or any other scripting language via ports. Perhaps one day someone will make a general purpose runtime image from it.