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BeagleBone Blue

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Yue.Kang edited this page Apr 4, 2018 · 18 revisions

BeagleBone Blue board

Official site: https://beagleboard.org/blue

Getting started Page: https://beagleboard.org/getting-started

Main steps:

If the BeagleBone Blue board does not boot, or if a newer OS version than the default one (Debian 8 jessie) is desired.

  • Download the latest Debian image for the BeagleBone Blue board and flash it to the SD card.
  • The official list of BeagleBone Blue OS images can be found here.
  • BeagleBone recommends using Etcher to write images to SD cards, while the manual procedure for flashing OS images on SD cards can be found in the Raspberry documentation.
  • The recommended OS is "Stretch IoT (non-GUI) for BeagleBone" (Debian 9.2 2017-10-10 4GB SD IoT). HOWEVER the APIs of the sensors, IMU, etc. provided by Robotics Cape (see here) are currently compatible with only Debian Jessie, which is also provided by BeagleBone as Debian 8.7 2017-03-19 4GB SD IoT.
  • The official steps to follow to flash the firmware to the board can be found here.
    • Make sure the board is powered off before inserting the SD card.

To turn the board on, either 1) plug the 12V adapter into the barrel power jack, or 2) connect the battery cable.

  • The 12V power jack is the designated way for recharging the battery and no other external battery charger will be provided: to recharge the battery connect it to the board and connect the board to the wall socket using the provided power adapter; the board will automatically start the battery charging procedure.
  • The wires connecting the battery to the board have a fragile connector. Handle with care and do not force-pull either the connector or the wires, they will easily break (and there are no spares).

Connect a PC to the board via Wi-Fi connection.

  • By default, the board will provide a Wi-Fi access point called BeagleBone-XXXX when powered on ("XXXX" varies between boards).
  • The default password is BeagleBone.
  • The board should be running a DHCP server that will assign to the clients an IP address in the range 192.168.8.X, reserving 192.168.8.1 for itself. The DHCP configuration file is found at the path /etc/dnsmasq.d/SoftAp0.
  • Default username and password for SSH: debian / temppwd.

A specification document provided by element14 community is available here.

Test connection and functionalities

To verify that you have successfully connected your PC to the board, you could run '$ rc_blink' and to see if the red and green LEDs on the board blink alternatively.

A series of executables named after 'rc_xxx' are provided as Robotics Cape Library, and could be found in '/usr/bin' directory. Details are available here.

Connect to a WiFi network via terminal

To connect to a WiFi network once logged via SSH use the command sudo connmanctl and follow the steps provided here.

Note that these commands can be run to connect to a WiFi network while being already connected to the default BeagleBone's access point.

Browse to the Raspberry Pi board using SSH.

Once logged in, use a terminal to SSH into the Raspberry Pi board with the command ssh [email protected]. The connection will use the interface usb0, details of which can be checked with the command ip a or ifconfig usb0.

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