Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with the BeagleBone Black”.
Um, i do technical editing, so i have a non-engineering kind of perspective on some stuff and i want to talk to you guys today about the beaglebone black. There are a lot of projects using it, and a lot of projects are really complex and big that you see. So, if you guys have seen david lane’s open, rov, the underwater robot, that’s using a beaglebone black there’s, a cool led, spinning wheel back there. I forget the name of it: that’s using a beaglebone black um, so i’m going to just show you what you can do with it. So a beaglebone black is very tiny and if it’s an altoids tin, i don’t have one here with me, but this is my little enclosure uh that i like to use.
So this is the black with a prototyping cape on it. I’Ve got one here. You can look at it so in the world, in the ecosystem of the beaglebone black. Oh there’s, there’s the altoids tin, and so you guys can see that that’s jason kreidner he’s uh ti guy and bone script.
So some of the stuff we’re talking about it’s his stuff um. So i’ve got my usb cable. It comes with a beaglebone black, i’m just going to plug it into my laptop, the board’s going to boot and we’re going to check out some slides. So this is an out of box experience example, so just plug in the usb.
So boris is five years old. We had a birthday party in michigan and it’s fun right. You guys are smiling, but boris is fun, and so there are beagle boards.
There are two beagleboards and there are two beaglebones, the one that probably will interest you. The most is beaglebone black, which obviously i’m talking about. So it’s 45 bucks and you get everything you need to work with it. So here’s a big blown up picture of it, showing the different process, the processors, the emmc, is where it stores the linux distribution angstrom. So when you get it, it comes pre-flashed you just plug it in and you get to have fun with it.
So here’s a more expansive blowout of all the different components – and this is a scary schematic right. So it’s open hardware, which means you could look at the schematics figure it out. You can look at the bomb, the bill of materials. You have access to.
All of that you can actually buy the sitara chip. That’S in the beaglebone bellac. I wouldn’t recommend you know, building your own, but you, i guess, could all right. So my web browser should have booted up and let’s see here all right.
Oh no, i was feeling adventurous and that’s bad, sometimes so i’m just gon na replug, the usb in and what’s gon na. What i’m trying to do is over the usb. I’M gon na be serving up an ip address and i will send my web browser to that ip address. This is the out of box experience, you have you just connect to the beagle and once it loads it’s coming up, you can see the lights are active and all right. So anyway, i actually dressed up as boris.
I had a full body, boris costume and jason and drew, and i went down to good morning america and uh that that was interesting. I don’t recommend being boris, but i recommend using the beaglebone. So i don’t know.
Oh there we go so look, that’s. That is being served up. This page is being served up from the board over the usb. So what’s awesome about this, how many of you guys had issues connecting with your cell phones today right like trying to send a tweet? That was not easy, so i’m completely self-contained here, and this is running on the board, so i can check out the platform and you can see here – javascript, that’s already written right and you’re probably wondering well.
This is kind of weird what what does it do? Well, let’s find out i’ll run it and it gives me some some vitals of the the beagleboard or beaglebone. Rather then, we have all these examples, so the get platform get pin mode. So you kind of see in the functions here that it’s a little bit a little arduino like in terms of its simplicity right, so it’s not trying to be arduino. It’S trying to just be accessible. Another cool thing is when we go to the demos there’s a demo area when you load up the board and, like i said i haven’t done anything special, i’m just plugging the board in and running it.
So i can look at a pressure and temperature sensor which is sort of uniquely uh. It’S a good thing to have today. I think, there’s a storm.
Coming from what i hear so the code is all written. I could start changing this, i mean i could put in a little comment. You know hi. Obviously you could, you know type your own code and change it, and here it shows the bone. Script is initialized. Bone script is a nodejs library.
That’S designed to easily interface with the with the gpio, so you can see there’s an expansive gpio uh. Hopefully you can see that i don’t want to switch cameras because it kind of takes time, but so you’re a coder right. You know how to program. What about circuits? Well, we’ve got a little circuit example and the fritzing right there.
So you can see you can buy the part from adafruit. You can put it on your proto board and wire it up and it will run and the code is there. So you can instantly get out of box experience, building circuits and getting coding immediately, and i i think that’s really really great um. So i’d go up here. I i had an issue with the wire these little wires. They didn’t like being in my bag. So but i would run it and see so: it’s spitting out data.
That is not correct. I think one of the wires slipped the plug, so that stuff is great. There’S um. There is an entire ecosystem of capes, so we talked about the proto board cape. So these are two examples: there are capes, there’s a guy just over there, who’s going to do an fpga on a cape.
That is pretty crazy. That’S way more way more technical than i want to get, but it’s available. You know i mentioned david lang’s, open rov. So you can have an undersea robot.
There are capes for for breaking out to the lego motors, the lego ev3, the new lego ev3 uses a similar, similar type of chip, but not the same chip and they’re. I’M trying to think of other cool capes, though so with capes. When you see them online you’ll see, are they compatible with the black? Are they compatible with white? One sort of tricky thing is that not all capes are are compatible with both despite the same form factor. So when you’re looking for a cape, make sure that there’s compatibility – and you know do your research and you know enjoy – enjoy the ease of using this.
So i guess i guess that’s pretty much about it. Do you guys have any questions about just like getting getting into this getting started with it um, just anyone if you have really tough ones, i’ll offload them to jason? No, all right yeah! Do we have uh a little all right that way? I can hear you and everyone can there’s uh mike coming for you. Thank you, hi all right, hi, hi, um so say: you’ve gone. You built your circuit, you’ve plugged all the outputs into the gpio. What happens when you want to actually finish it or make it so that uh, the pins won’t fall off if you put it inside like a toy robot or a rov or something? Okay, that’s a good question. So you have you have access to all the all! The hardware files for like a base so there’s a basic cape um design right.
This is yeah, so you can have access to that in in the program that you’re designing like if you’re using fritzy. I’M not sure i understand you want to like take a cape and make it permanent right. Okay, so a breadboard yeah. So what what you would do is is you would take something like this? It’S just single.
You know it’s not electrically connected and you could solder into it and and just like you would with a perf board um, but if you wanted to get really extreme, you know there are, there are the design files and you could actually build your own cape right. That’S what that’s, what open rov does they have their own cape and it’s really uh really pretty elaborate doing a very specialized task, and so that’s one of the beauties about the beaglebone black is. If you want to do something very specific, it’s very good at that, and you can channel all your resources to do that or it can be a platform where you’re learning to code and learning how to interface with with the environment and pushing data to the web. So it’s a it’s a real, robust platform. So anyone else all right going once do we uh jason? Do we have any uh stickers, all right so guys, stickers? Who doesn’t i mean? How can you not like boris? It’S an awesome dog jason’s got some stickers and thanks a lot for coming out. .