hi there your project is a little mysterious, so it is hard to be specific but here are some thoughts based on my own recent research into using beaglebones to drive LEDstrips and a custom LCD array.
from https://github.com/osresearch/LEDscape "the beaglebone SOC has two PRUs (programmable realtime unit) which are designed for this sort of purpose. the TI AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 in the BeagleBone Black has two programmable "microcontrollers" built into the CPU that can handle realtime tasks and also access the ARM's memory. This allows things that might have been delegated to external devices to be handled without any additional hardware, and without the overhead of clocking data out the USB port." (I am actually using a fork of this library https://github.com/Yona-Appletree/LEDscape for driving LED strips, and am planning to modify this code for my other project) PRUs run at 200MHz and have very efficient access to some (more than the 16 bits that you require) of the GPIO pins (these need to be pin-muxed correctly - that is another can of worms / kettle of fish). you read / write to pins by reading / writing to specific PRU registers. so you can read/write 8 (or more) bits simultaneously. it's much more efficient than the more traditional Linux sysfs approach. there is a FAQ about using the PRUs stickied at the top of this group and lots more info on The internet's. Trammell Hudson, who developed the original LEDscape code, seems to have done quite a bit of interfacing beaglebones to old computing hardware. http://trmm.net/Category:Retrocomputing eg http://trmm.net/Mac-SE_video another example http://blinkenbone.com/projects/blinkenbone I've found a logic analyser (eg https://www.saleae.com) to be very useful when doing this sort of stuff. john -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beagleboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
