CI/CD Pipeline for BeagleBone AI 64 with Zephyr RTOS

This blog outlines a CI/CD pipeline for building and deploying Zephyr RTOS applications to a BeagleBone AI 64 board. The pipeline utilizes Docker for containerized builds and leverages SSH for secure deployment.

Prerequisites:

Docker installed on your CI/CD runner SSH keypair for BeagleBone access BeagleBone AI 64 board openbeagle account

Pipeline Stages:

The pipeline consists of three main stages:

Build:

• Creates a deployment directory.
• Initializes a Zephyr project workspace using west with the ai64-r5 branch from the glneo/zephyr repository.
• Updates the Zephyr project workspace.
• Exports the Zephyr build environment.
• Builds the Zephyr application (samples/hello_world) for the sk_am62/am6234/m4 target board.
• Copies the generated Zephyr ELF file (zephyr.elf) to the deployment directory.

• Artifacts:

• Saves the build artifact (deploy/zephyr.elf) upon successful build completion.
• Sets an expiration time of 28 days for the artifact.

Deploy:

• Installs the openssh-client package within the Docker container for SSH functionality.
• Creates the SSH key directory and sets appropriate permissions.
• Adds the BeagleBone’s host key to the known_hosts file.
• Securely copies the Zephyr ELF file (zephyr.elf) to the BeagleBone’s /lib/firmware directory using SSH.
• Connects to the BeagleBone and executes commands via SSH to:
• Stop the remote processor.
• Load the Zephyr ELF file.
• Start the remote processor.

Pipeline Variables:

1) SSH_PRIVATE_KEY: The private SSH key used to access the BeagleBone. 2) BEAGLEBONE_USER: The username for SSH access on the BeagleBone. 3) BEAGLEBONE_HOST: The hostname or IP address of the BeagleBone.