Beagle Bone :

• Beagle Board
• Beagle BoardxM
• Beagle Bone White
• Beagle Bone Black
• Based on ARM cortex A8
• 512 DDR3 RAM
• 4 GB on board Storage
Introduction to Beagle Boards :
• Beagle boards are tiny computers with all the capabilities of
today’s desktop machine.
• To teach open source hardware and software capabilities
• Produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-
Key and Newark element14
• Developed as a demonstration of OMAP (Open Multimedia
Application platform) System on Chip (Soc)
• CPU: ARM Cortex A8
• Supported OS: Linux, Minix, FreeBSD, Android, Symbian, RISC
OS
Beagleboard – Rev. C
Hardware - Beagleboard
 OMAP3530 (Soc) forms the core of the board.
 Uses Package on Package stacking of memory on top of OMAP
 Memory:
 256MB NAND, 256MB DDR SDRAM
 Interfaces:
 DVI-D (via HDMI connector), JTAG, RS232, USB2 OTG
 Stereo In, Stereo Out, S-Video, USB2 Host
 Expansion Header: I2C, I2S, SPI, MMC/SD
 Can be USB bus powered or take DC power
Using the Beagleboard
 Booting:
 NAND -> USB-> UART -> MMC (For Beagle Board)
 USB -> UART -> MMC -> NAND (For processor)
 Uses U-Boot (Universal Boot loader)
 Provides a simple Command Line Interface to manipulate hardware
prior to booting a kernel
 MMC/SD is the only way to bring up a new board.
Beagleboard - Software
 Distributions you can use:
 Angstrom
 Ubuntu
 Android (Google’s open source software stack for mobile devices)
 Number of other embedded Linux distros.
Developing for Beagleboard
 Openembedded (OE):
 Provides an easy to use build environment
 Collection of metadata about software packages
 support for many hardware architectures
 runs on any Linux distribution
 Cross Compilation

 Other options:
 Use the Android SDK
 Build your own toolchain
 Start from a ready made image
BeagleBone
• Announced in the end of October 2011

• The BeagleBone is a barebone development board with a Sitara ARM Cortex-

A8 processor

• 720 MHz, 256 MB of RAM

• Two 46-pin expansion connectors

• On-chip Ethernet

• A microSD slot and a USB host port

• A device port which includes low-level serial control and JTAG hardware
debug connections, so no JTAG emulator is required.
BeagleBone Features :
• Built-in networking
• Remote access
• File system
• Use many different programming languages
• Multitasking
• Linux software
• Open Source
BeagleBone Black
Component Locations
Connector and switch
Locations
4 LEDs
Lets start with basic: LEDS
• There are four user LED(s) on the Beaglebone. The user
LED(s) are
• Accessible from user space on the file system at this location:
/sys/class/leds/
• There is one directory per user LED, named as shown below:
• /sys/class/leds/beaglebone::usr0/ (GPIO1_21)
• /sys/class/leds/beaglebone::usr1/ (GPIO2_22)
• /sys/class/leds/beaglebone::usr2/ (GPIO2_23)
• /sys/class/leds/beaglebone::usr3/ (GPIO2_24)
On-board LED:
• Write the following commands in your terminal (First one is
for turning ON and latter for OFF):
• USER0 : heartbeat indicator from the Linux kernel.
• USER1 : SD card access
• USER2 : activity indicator. Turns on when the kernel is not in
the idle loop.
• USER3 : Onboard eMMC is access.
Comparison :