Carbon Footprint Monitoring - BeagleBoneBlack Quick Recipe

There are a lot of resources available online to setup the Beagle Bone Black and connect it with AirVantage.  This post will be a quick start guide to get your BBB talk to AirVantage in under an hour (assuming all things going well).

A Bit of Intro

Beagle Bone Black is yet another powerful development Single Board Computer running on TI's AM335x processor with an ARM Cortex-A8 at its core clocked at 1GHz.  One of the main features of the BBB is its embedded MMC that is preloaded with a Debian (Linux) Image, which takes the hassle out of setting up an SD-card and flashing an operating system.  BBB has taken a plug-n-play approach.  More info can be found in their main website.    Enough with all this introduction and let's get the BBB ready. 

Ingredients (still feeling festive)

To start off, we will need

1    BeagleBoneBlack

1    Ethernet Cable

1    USB mini cable or 5V power supply

IP Scanner (i.e. Advance IP Scanner)

Telnet/SSH Client (i.e. PuTTY, SmarTTY, OSX Terminal)

Web Browser (i.e. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.)

Directions

1. Connect the BBB to your home network by plugging the ethernet cable to your router.
2. Power the BBB by plugging the USB mini cable to a USB power supply (I'm powering mine from the USB port of my router).
3. If you haven't installed the software tools, now is the best time to do so while BBB is booting up (takes about 10secs for the boot process to complete).
4. Run Advance IP Scanner, to retrieve the IP address of the BBB.  Sort by Manufacturer and take note of the device from Texas Instruments.  This will be the IP Address of the BeagleBoneBlack. 

   5. Next we will update the system.  Using an SSH client, connect to the BeagleBoneBlack, username is root with an empty password.  I usually setup a password as some SSH clients do not connect with remote devices with an empty password.  To change/setup the password, type the command passwd.  To update the system, type the following commands:

                    apt-get update

                    apt-get upgrade

   6.  On a web browser, enter the IP address to retrieve the board's serial number to be used later on.

   7.  Now, we are ready to setup a connection to Sierra Wireless' AirVantage.  Login or register a trial account to AirVantage if you haven't done so.  Follow this guide to setup an AirVantage application.  Half-way through the page, there is a specific guide for the BeagleBoneBlack.  Stop at that point and proceed to the next step before following AirVantage's BBB guide.

   8.  Back to the web browser, connect to the Cloud9 IDE at port 3000, i.e. 192.168.1.77:3000

   Cloud9 IDE is yet another great feature, you can delve into development immediately without installing a separate IDE.

   9. In the Workspace (right pane), create a new folder for development.  In the bash pane (lower section), change the directory to the newly created folder and install the MQTT library.

   10.  After that's installed, you can proceed with the Beagle Bone specific guide.

This is the basic setup to get you up and running the BBB with AirVantage.  As an additional reference, you can look at Node.js v0.10.35 Manual & Documentation.  If you are going to use the CC3200 with the BBB, have a look at the net module.

'Til next post, HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!!!