Beaglebone

First little project with the Beaglebone

Posted in Arduino, Beaglebone on July 23rd, 2012 by x-firm – Comments Off

I would like to connect an Arduino to the Beaglebone true its USB host port to let the Arduino do all low level stuff. I thought it could not be that hard :) and after some trying it turned out it wasn’t.

I loaded the example sketch ASCII table by Tom Igoe that prints out byte values in all possible formats true the serial port of the arduin. If i could get that to print out in the console or in some serial console for linux.

But first I did’nt know what the device file would be named for an usb to serial adapter on the Beagelbone. So I plugged in my Arduino and  used the command dmesg | tail to see what happened.


root@beaglebone:~# dmesg | tail
[  712.471055] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 64932343738351312182
[  712.471901] cdc_acm 1-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
[  961.711404] usb 1-1: USB disconnect, device number 5
[  963.279604] usb 1-1: new full-speed USB device number 6 using musb-hdrc
[  963.420999] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=2341, idProduct=0001
[  963.421019] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=220
[  963.421032] usb 1-1: Product: Arduino Uno
[  963.421043] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Arduino (www.arduino.cc)
[  963.421054] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 64932343738351312182
[  963.421916] cdc_acm 1-1:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
root@beaglebone:~#


So now when I know that I need to communicate with it and I found out that there are an serial console program called minicom in the Ångström distribution that I use on my Beaglebone. It seamed easy to use so I started up minicom in setup mode by the following command

root@beaglebone:~# minicom -s

Than I change the settings in minicom to use ttyACM0 as port and also change the boud rate to 9600.

Then I exit the setup menu and as soon I press the Arduino reset button it prints out the ASCII table as it should.
I think for the next step I will try to get an node.js script talking to the arduino and print out the result to the console.

I googled some and found this sites about communication with an arduino true node.js

And also an serial library for node.js that most use

I have now gotten my hands on an Beaglebone

Posted in Beaglebone on July 22nd, 2012 by x-firm – Comments Off

I love this little thing, it was really easy to get it started and playing with it but you will soon find out that there are not so much information regarding the Beaglebone yet.

Here is some information:

The Beagle Bone is a great step up from microcontrollers (such as AVR, PIC, ARM Cortex M3, 8051, Propeller, etc) to microcomputers. Unlike a microcontroller, where the FLASH, EEPROM, RAM, etc is all in one chip, a microcomputer has them separated out, like a classic computer such as a desktop or laptop machine. The Beagle Bone has a main processor core running at 700MHz, a chunk of 256M DDR RAM, and permanent storage onto a microSD card. This makes for a powerful machine, that has no problems running Linux, a webserver, Python, FTP clients, SSH, etc.

The Bone also has great accessories built in, such as onboard Ethernet with 10/100M connectivity, mini USB port with TTL serial converter, JTAG debugger for advanced hacking, USB A host port for connecting a hub/WiFi/etc, power management IC that keeps the board safe from a misplugged adapter, and tons of 0.1″ spaced breakouts

One of the powerful abilities of the Bone is that it has I2C, SPI, and GPIO at a hobbyist-friendly 3.3V level (instead of the more difficult to interface 1.8V) while also running complex applications such as a webserver. This allows for more complex projects that would tax an Arduino.

I noticed some thing was wrong when I should try to use Cloud9 and the Bonescript to play around with some of the in and outputs. I got some nasty compiler errors when I tried to run an node.js script, I found some information about the factory flashed image you get with the Beaglebone cane some times be damaged.

So I wanted to load a new image on the flash card but all information an how to do that was for linux. But i found this site where there ware an step by step guide for windows and also the latest image released with the revision A6 of the Beagelbone.  After that everything worked good.

Some good links:

http://beagleboard.org/static/beaglebone/latest/README.htm

http://learn.adafruit.com/beaglebone

http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=BeagleBone

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fgiHs41mhDcJ:www.gigamegablog.com/2012/01/05/beaglebone-coding-101-blinking-an-led/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk

https://plus.google.com/104712705716996155416/posts

http://borderhack.com/?p=1062

http://www.unixguide.net/linux/linuxshortcuts.shtml (General linux guide)