Beaglebone black first impressions on MacOS

I'm a bit of a sucker for a cheap unix computer. In recent months I've been playing with Raspberry Pi devices but ran in to problems with audio over the USB. When the $60 Beaglebone black went on sale, I couldn't resist.

This board, which is about the size of an Altoids tin, features:

• 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor
• uHDMI video socket
• uSD card socket
• 2GB on-board storage all ready to boot
• 5V in socket
• 2 USB sockets
• Ethernet socket

To get started, I've done the following:

• Plug the board in to the USB port on my Mac using the supplied cable (no other power is needed for the board)
• A USB storage device mounts and all the documentation and drivers are available. Open START.htm to read the documentation.
• From the Drivers folder, there are two drivers, one for serial over USB and the other for a network connection over USB. I already have the serial FTDI driver so I installed the RNDIS driver (which seems to be an Android open source thing).
• Unmounted the BEAGLEBONE disk, unplugged it from USB.
• Re-plugged the USB and waited for the drive to mount.
• At this point I could ping 192.168.7.2 and load http://192.168.7.2
• In terminal ssh root@192.168.7.2 (hit return for password)
• Plugged the board into a hub on my network with an ethernet cable
• ifconfig shows that the board now has an IP address and can reach the internet
• opkg update
• opkg upgrade # this runs for some time (I left it over night)

It's marvellous that the board has enough storage on-board to boot up linux and there is a socket for extra storage. Angstrom linux is a mystery to me but I'm going to give it a go and maybe switch to something more familiar to me later if I hit a wall.

Later...

Hmm, I left the opkg upgrade running over night but in the morning I notice that it didn't complete correctly - looks like it lost network connection.


 * opkg_install_pkg: Failed to download perl-module-unicode-collate-locale-da. Perhaps you need to run 'opkg update'?
 * pkg_run_script: package "bonescript" postinst script returned status 1.
 * opkg_configure: bonescript.postinst returned 1.
root@beaglebone:~# reboot

It did not reboot. I've tried with the ethernet cable disconnected (a user reported this as a possible issue). I have to go to the office so will come back to this and report when I figure out how to re-flash.

Today, I picked up a 4GB uSD card and followed the instructions here to re-flash the built-in on-board flash and all is well.

MacOS

The provided instructions are rather focussed on Windows for imaging a uSD card for re-flashing but I was able to do it on MacOS as follows:

Use 'diskutil list' before and after inserting the card to figure out which /dev/diskX it is.


$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
$ sudo dd if=BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.05.08.img of=/dev/disk2
Password:
7143424+0 records in
7143424+0 records out
3657433088 bytes transferred in 12416.160438 secs (294570 bytes/sec)

It's rather slow, this took 3.5 hours.

I like the way the default linux registers the beaglebone on mDNS (bonjour) so I can find it on the network like this:

ssh root@beaglebone.local

Incidentally, these things really do fit in a lolly tin, here's mine in a "Fisherman's Friend" tin along side a Raspberry Pi.

Resources

There is a big list of projects.  Angstrom Linux has a marvellous list of pre-built packages. I notice that gnu-radio is there...