Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with the BeagleBone Black – David Scheltema”.
Welcome everyone, if you’re here for the beaglebone black getting started with talk, come on over if you’re not sure what the beaglebone black is come on over, especially you. This talk is meant to be a very cursory introduction. I’M dave i’m from make i’m one of the technical editors and one of my real passions is small embedded electronic boards that run linux kind of a very specific thing, but what’s great about the make community, is it’s not all that specific anymore? There are tons of boards. The board i’m going to talk about is the beaglebone black. It’S a very, very powerful single board computer, i’m showing you boris right now. Boris is, of course a beagle. If you know anything about dogs – and he is the mascot now, boris is actually five years old and that’s not using any dog years.
That’S five: human years we had a birthday party for him, and so this board right here that i’m talking this is what a beaglebone black looks like you’ll see it in the background above the cake, it was a good cake. The beaglebone had beagleboards, which is kind of confusing, so beagleboards were older. Like what’s helpful, is they were square square pcbs where the beagle bones are rounded and they were around it for a reason, if it looks like a familiar form factor, it actually can fit inside an altoids tin, which is kind of handy for carrying it around.
I do that when i travel a lot, because i don’t want to crash crash the electronics and damage them anyway. So what is a beagle? A beagle breaks down into a lot of technical things, i’ll give just an overview, it’s a one, gigahertz arm processor. So that’s a lot of power.
That’S way more power than i ever had in my first computer. It packs 512 megabytes of ram, and that allows you that that threshold allows you to run linux, but it also allows you to run android. You can run android on this board, which, for some people is a very, very cool option. You can also run freebsd, but that’s out of the getting started. You can also run windows ce, but you know who? Who knows if you want to do that, but you know options. Options are good, so here’s more of a breakout.
What the board is, you can see label there’s a a 10 100 ethernet. There’S uh there’s a standard usb micro on this and that’s how i’m powering it so all i’m doing to power. This is plugging it into my my laptop, and this is important, because not only does it supply power to my board, but it also allows me for a way to interface with the board, so we’ll get more on that in a little little bit now this screen Looks looks a bit frightening right, a little not like this should be in the getting started with talk, but it’s important because when you’re dealing with with these boards, you want to know how much you can grow and one of the things that holds back growth. In learning about boards and about engineering is whether or not the hardware is open. So your pro, how many of you are familiar with open software? Okay, so it’s basically the same idea but with hardware: are you anyone familiar with open hardware? Okay, so right a lot less of you and it’s more of a recent thing, and so i won’t go into the specifics, but the hardware is open. So this schematic, i didn’t sign any any non-disclosure agreement.
I just downloaded it from the site: pretty cool right, pretty cool. If you want to get into it, pretty scary, if you don’t, you don’t need to so. This is a screenshot of of the interface on my board and i’m going to break out of the power of the slideshow here and what i’m going to do.
Is you see this boot uh, the little boot folder? That’S actually the beagle. So i’m gon na double click on this and i am going to run the readme. So what the readme did was the readme was an html document right, so a web page.
Basically, so i’m in a browser, every every laptop you have probably has a browser right, and you see that there there are two green there’s step one and step two step. One is plug-in beagle. Well, you see i’ve done that over the usb step. Two is install drivers. I did that ahead of time because well, i didn’t want to have a presentation disaster step three browse to the server.
So what i’m gon na do is i’m gon na click click here to launch if you’re not familiar. This is a private ip address and again i’m not connected to the internet. I’M only connected over this usb cable, so i’ll click there. This page is being served up from this board, so this board is providing all the information to my browser. You can see that my board is connected, then i can jump into getting getting right into using the board. So i can run example code. I can find out information about my board: whoa, hey that wasn’t the board, but good timing right.
So if, if you have uh, if you have some experience coding, there’s an ide, so i’m going to jump back to my slideshow very quickly here, let’s see or attempt to and of course it disappeared. So all right. So this is the interface. This is not in my browser now. This is in my bad power. Well, my bad image: uh open dock! Actually, so this is boris again, but what’s with boris’s outfit, you notice the cape right, so how many of you are familiar with? Arduinos? What’S hands? Okay, so you all know what uh, what the add-on boards for arduinos are called right. They’Re called shields right so, rather than follow the same nomenclature as arduino, it follow the same spirit so add-on boards that sit atop. The input and output rails on a beagle are called capes. So that’s why boris is wearing a cape here right, keep it simple break it down with images, and it’s fun too. I don’t know which boris i like better, though the cape’s pretty cool. So here’s another screenshot – and this is again of my browser, a screenshot of the browser. You can see the tabs uh and – and this is the first experience you when you log into the ide and the way you access the ide. Is you go the same way? You would open it by accessing the web server, that’s on the board and it’ll come up and it’ll walk you through, and you can start typing code in a real ide, so it uses an idea called cloud9 if you’re not familiar with it. No big deal.
It’S just an idea: a development environment that runs in your browser, pretty cool, right, everything’s contained and again, the only thing that’s connected is this usb wire right so best of all it comes with the board, so everything you need to run. Hey again right excitement about that everything you need to run the board comes in the box. You don’t need to buy other stuff. You know we assume you.
I assume you all have computers right, yeah. If not you could you could do something else, some other option, but i’m i’m rocking right out of the box and all of the stuff i’m showing you is only stuff you, it’s all stuff you can do out of the box. I think it’s important to differentiate between you know boards that take a while take a lot of fun team for peripherals and adding stuff and just stuff that works right away right.
We all like we all like apple stuff, because it just works, so the beagle just works. So i this is my contact info. You’Re.
Welcome to contact me come up and talk with me, i’m happy to talk about the beagle. If you want to see more advanced stuff, the the beaglebone there’s drew fustini he’s uh he’s helping man, the beagle beaglebone booth he’s got great stickers, so you could get a sticker like the one on my laptop and matt richardson. The gentleman who was talking right before me, he also is into all sorts of embedded boards, not just the raspberry pi. He wrote an excellent book that i i can’t recommend. I can’t recommend more highly it’s just it’s really great it’ll help help everyone get started with this and it’s called getting started with the beaglebone and it actually covers the beaglebone black and the beaglebone white, which is the older, uh older beaglebone. But are there any questions? Yeah, if you can uh yell your question real loud and then i’ll repeat it, that’s a great question. So i spent most of my time talking about how simple it is and great that i run it in the browser. Well, you’re right, that’s convenient for when you’re on the go, you know maybe you’re in an airplane and you for some reason you want to code on the beagle. There is a micro hdmi, which first i’ve seen it right. Normally, your hdmi is big and fat, and it’s like you know, on the back of your tv or vcr. This is actually it right here. I’M going to jump back in my slides and we’ll uh we’ll see. So you see micro hdmi right here at the bottom and it it kind of looks like a micro uh usb, but you plug you plug the cable in and it’s not it’s actually not an expensive cable. But what i wanted to do was really highlight how quickly and how, how powerfully you can get going just with an out of the box experience.
So there the capes also add more features, but you can run you can connect in a usb hub or you can connect to keyboard and it’s a it’s a full linux, computer uh. So you can, you can run debian or you can run uh something called angstrom which is more for embedded linux engineers, so people who are designing embedded systems – it’s not it’s not the best for beginners, is probably more preferable. How many of you have used? Ubuntu linux? Okay, so debian is actually what ubuntu is based off of so, if you’re familiar with ubuntu you’re going to get in debian a little bit less of a polished, graphical interface. But you know when you’re, when you’re doing like a with a board like this you’re, not really looking for a huge multimedia experience with you know, awesome, hd, graphics and all that you’re looking to learn.
You know use coding and especially with the beagle learning, how to interface with the world right you, you have all these input and outputs right. I mean that’s a ton 46 on each side, so any uh, any other questions, yeah you’re way back there. So i’ll! Try! Yes, uh, so there there are, there are you can run android on it um and it’s at the minimum threshold to run android with the uh with the memory at 5 12.. But you can do it, there’s an official image uh for satarro, which is the chip that the beagle uses that you can get from ti, but there’s also a gentleman who’s written a really excellent tutorial on how to uh compile your own, which you know.
That might be for you, because if you’re asking about you know android, you might be, you might be of that uh persuasion to compile so yes, uh any any other questions. Yeah you’re gon na have to really yell. I know right, they timed it again. That’S three! Really, yellow.
That is a great question, so the the question was: can an arduino be combined with a beagle and the answer is yes, and i think we should talk about that more because i want to let the next person come up, but i do want to answer your Question the answer is yes, so if you want to hear about the the longer answer, come on, see me on the side of the stage, but thank you very much. .