Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with the BeagleBone Black III”.
Alright, guys hi, I’m Dave shelter, my I’m with make magazine, I’m a sistent technical editor and we are going to talk about getting started with the BeagleBone black. How many of you guys have heard of the BeagleBone or beagle boards before? Okay, so a few guys. So what what the BeagleBone is is this is boris the beagle and he’s the mascot for the board and here’s the the BeagleBoard itself. So Boris is five years old and a lot of people don’t realize that the project is this. This old, a lot of people, think it began with the BeagleBone black.
There were actually two boards that were bigger. They didn’t fit inside an L toys tin. This one isn’t an Altoids tin, but it you can see it’s really small and compact. So here is the board itself: it’s a it’s a TI, satara chip.
It’S a Giga hurt. It’S got 512 megs of ram on it and there’s a microSD I so if you’re looking where’s the where’s, the video out, it’s it’s actually small and that probably gives you a better overview. You can see all the various functions and breakouts for the board. So what we’re going to do today is actually look at what your experience is it with the board when you just get it out of the box, so the board, like I said, looks like this.
I comes with a USB cable and i just plugged it into my laptop now. I’M not doing that today to show you because it can be a little dicey, doing a presentation and hoping it comes up. I assure you it does, but so here’s a while we wait for that.
I’M showing you a schematic, because the BeagleBone is not just open source running linux, it’s open hardware, so this is a schematic of the actual board. You have access to this. You could make your own beagle boards, it could be challenging, but you know if you want to take if you’re an electrical engineer want to do that, it is possible.
So capes right, Boris, is dressed up. He’S a superhero. I’Ve got a prototyping cape here. You can see, there’s nothing really on it and it just fits on top of my beagle and what this will do is there are capes that allow you to do things like adventure under the sea.
You guys have probably seen David Lang’s open, ROV project. If you haven’t he’s way out over by the food area and he’s got an underwater robot that can go 300 feet under the water adventuring around, there are there’s a guy over there who has an FPGA cape they’re people back there. When you leave tonight, you’ll see lights that are making a big maker maker faire logo. That’S run by a BeagleBone, it’s a very, very powerful chip and board. So we’re gon na jump over here. You guys notice in my browser I metal 192, I’m another private, IP space and that’s being served up. This is the board, that’s serving it up it’s on the USB, so the USB has its own IP. That’S connected to my laptop I’d: hold it up, but the AV stuff would go all over, so I don’t want to do that, but you see right here where there’s green.
That’S actually telling me that my board is connected to the web site. All the websites on the board – and now I can start to do things with the board itself right on the left hand, side you see these. These various commands, that’s sort of what they’re just functions, we’re going to go to get platform, see I’m still green, and so here’s the JavaScript right here, I’m going to run it and it spits out all right. I’Ve got a BeagleBone black. My version number is it’s actually an a5, it just has a 0 in front of it, and so you can see.
Obviously I didn’t type this in, but you can interact with the board right from your browser right from right from the JavaScript. So there’s a library that runs in ojs called bone script. You guys are lucky because the guy who does bond script is right over there in red, Jason, cried nur and he’s going to be talking after me about how to do really really cool stuff. I’M just kind of getting you into so still on the left side of the page. You can see that there are.
There are demos, so I can actually learn how to build a temperature sensor. So you see you have the Fritzing diagram. You have the wiring that you need to do so. This is a breakout board for temperature and barometric pressure that you can just buy from Adafruit, so you buy the BeagleBone black.
You buy a barometric pressure and temp sensor and a couple wires and you’ve got you’ve. Got something fun to interact with and the codes written here, so this is this code sometime, so you can see the temperature. I think I have a bad wire so carrying around in my bag all day, but you can see how it would spit out. You know the readings and what’s cool about this is sometimes when you’re on a cape.
The sensor can be a little bit more finicky right. Sometimes it’s reporting it’s hotter than it actually is. Yesterday, when I have this working, it said it was 85 and I don’t really think it was 85 degrees, but then you can just go in and manipulate it right. So this is this cell right here for the JavaScript.
I i can write in line right now. In program on it and then execute that code, there’s also there’s an IDE called cloud nine again, this is all on the board. You know you probably have tried to use your cell phone here and you can’t write I’m not on any Wi-Fi. I’M just served up over the USB, so cloud nine is connecting. This is also a java’s, a java in script environment. So i could take a little tutorial. I’Ve already done that, but it’s great to check it out. You can see I can just go.
This is an IDE full-fledged one cool thing to note that isn’t necessarily said in the in the instructions is: if you see this autorun folder right here, you can actually put one of your javascript as files in that and it will execute on boot, and this is Really cool because you don’t have to mess around with the links right. You can just write your code in cloud: nine put it in the autorun and you’re executing as soon as the board has power, and you know I think that that’s really robust, really robust out of box solution. So anyway, do you guys have any questions about the BeagleBone black or about the linux? How to access it or yeah? Can we guys? Can we get a little mic for him? No, we don’t! Okay! So if you didn’t really speak up, yes, that, thank you. That is a great question. All of this stuff is pre-installed, and so what honestly, all I did to get this talk ready to show you the board, was I put a cape on it and remember: the Cape is just like this, so my Cape has a little bread board on it and It has a temperature and barometric pressure and then it has some wires, but I didn’t install any any crazy packages. I didn’t have to install the IDE out of box.
It’S it’s all on an emmc which is a basically a storage device right on the board. So it comes shipped to you with all of this on it, so there’s no Wi-Fi adapter on the board. The board comes with a single USB, the USBA, and you can use a Wi-Fi adapter of your own and, as with any of these boards, you know the Raspberry Pi or the BeagleBone black.
You want to have a powered hub just so, when you have won your throttling data, the amperage is going to go up. You don’t want to mess up the power to the board. Weird things can happen, but the so one thing you’ll find online is people are saying the Wi-Fi doesn’t work.
That’S not true that it was an older image where they didn’t. They didn’t have the firmware of the Wi-Fi. So if you see that don’t get scared off, it’s not accurate.
If you just download the latest image which the boards are shipping with you’ll be fine, so any others from the bat yeah, okay yeah. So the question is about connectivity right so right now, i’m using just the USB and – and i think you were asking – can i is there a Wi-Fi on it? Is that or sorry you can’t you can use this interface yeah over I mean you have the adapter and I’m not sure I’m getting your question. So we can talk with me after its light, any more questions, yeah you’re, going to really have to shout since you’re.
The third rail, okay, so there’s there’s the USB there’s the a and then you have you have the power. So you just keep Jason to the. Can the power 1 be sort of tweak to be a host or okay? Alright, so it does all right there. You go so if you have any super technical Jason’s, the guy to talk to so I’m gon na anyway. Well, any more questions! Yes! Yes, yes, so it’s yeah! So it’s running I so it’s opkg is for for the angstrom it ships with angstrom. You can get Debbie in to run.
You can get one too. I’Ve heard good things about fedora, possibly getting getting a lot of support. You actually can even run windows, ce e on it yeah.
I know I know but bad faces. I know, but you can do it, you can get bsd to run on it. So it’s really an ideal platform for embedded development, but it’s also a platform that shouldn’t be scary.
You shouldn’t see all these rails and think you know I can’t how am I going to remember all this? You should see it as a is a way to build off of right. You have a lot of potential and so yeah I’ve got stickers for everyone. So if you want to come up and see see if you grab a few stickers, that’s cool also stay around because Jason Kriner, the co-creator of beagleboard, is going to be talking and he’s right after me.
So we’re going to do a quick setup with him and you guys will be blown away by the cool stuff he’s going to show you. So thanks a lot for coming out today and enjoy Maker Faire .