Setup BeagleBone Black working environment

The very first thing we need to do now is preparing developing environment with BeagleBone Black.

1. Unboxing BeagleBone Black

You can by a BeagleBone Black board quite easily nowadays on Tiki or electronic component stores. I bought one for myself and its cost is 1.7 million dong.

When unboxing a new BeagleBone Black, you can find:

• 1 totally new BeagleBone Black board
• 1 mini-USB cable

Of course we need to prepare something more to make it works.

2. Connect to BBB through debug port

The producer flash image into BBB memory already by default, so I will introduce you how to setup devices environment to work with it. And all the modification will be shown in other posts.

• First we can power up for the board by using mini-USB cable. one end is plugged into board, the other end is plugged into your PC. The power LED near 5V DC jack should be turned on.

• Now we need a USB to Serial module, I am using here a CP210x one, but you can use every kind of device you have

• Connect USB to Serial module to BBB through UART interface, this interface on BBB is used for debugging:

USB to Serial Module	BBB debug port
GND pin	J1 – Pin 1 (GND)
TXD pin	J1 – Pin 4 (RXD)
RXD pin	J1 – Pin 5 (TXD)

• Plug USB-Serial to PC and open Tera Term application

• On TeraTerm select Setup -> Serial port to change UART baudrate to 115200 as the default configuration on BBB

• Press Enter and you can see the login request, that mean the connection is succeed

• To really access the board, you need to fill:
  • Username: debian
  • Password: temppwd

Developing environment is almost finish, we can do some basic work now like write a hello_world C application and build it with gcc. I will show you how to make it in next post.

3. Connect to BBB through Ethernet

We can access BBB through Ethernet to transfer data from host PC to BBB.

• Connect microHDMI to HDMI converter to BBB

• Connect HDMI cable to a monitor

• If everything is correct, you will see Beagle screen on the monitor

• Connect USB Hub and with a keyboard and mouse

• Also connect BBB Ethernet port to the router that your host PC is connecting, that thing to make sure your BBB and host PC are in same LAN area

• Now check your BBB ip addres by using QTerminal

• Type “ip addr | grep eth0” to get ipaddress

• Or much more simple, you can get it by using the Debug console on TeraTerm

• Now you need to connect through Ethernet through SSH

• The SSH connect will request you to add the username and password

• Type default username and password:
  • Username: debian
  • Password: temppwd
• If you changed password before, then use it in here and remember it carefully.

• SSH connection is established successfully

• Now you have an other method to remote access your BBB without using UI.

4. What can we do next?

Now your BBB is working as a normal PC with Linux OS, you can do everything you want with it. However, this is just a start, I will show you how can we program Linux Application and Kernel Device Driver with it in other posts.

Hope to see you soon.