BeagleBone: Getting Started

Installing Software

Connecting to the BeagleBone board is pretty easy, here’s the quick run down of how to do it:

1) Download and install the driver:

32 bit

64 bit

2) Download and install putty:

PuTTY

Connecting

Now that you have all of the necessary software installed, you need to figure connect to the board. To do this, open device manager. I always forget where it is, so I think the easiest way to get to it is just to search for it:

Start -> Search Text Box : “Device Manager”

Once in the device manager, expand the “Ports (COM & LPT)” section.  This is where the BeagleBone will show up once it is plugged in.

Now plug in the BeagleBone. The “Ports (COM & LPT)” section should update and the BeagleBone board should show up there.  For me it was difficult figuring out which one it was, so I had to watch the list pretty closely.

The important part is what COM port it was assigned.  Once you know this open up PuTTY and:

Change the “Connection Type” to “Serial”

Set the “Serial Line” to COM<X> where <X> is the number that you found in the Device Manager.

Set the “Speed” to 115200

Click “Open”

I don’t know why, but mine comes up blank and I have to hit enter before it does anything.  Once I hit enter, it prompts me for a “beaglebone login”, which is “root”.

At this point you should be up and running with your BeagleBone.

Ethernet

Now that we are connected to the BeagleBone through the USB connection, we want to be able to connect to it through Ethernet.  To do this, we first need to figure out its IP Address, which can be obtained through the command:

Ifconfig -a

Then take the eth0 IP address and type that into Firefox or Chrome.  That should land you on a BeagleBoard 101 page.

Blink an LED

Create a circuit like the one shown here:

Now that we have the circuit built, we need to run a program that blinks the LED.  Fortunately, an example comes built in with the BeagleBone board.  To access it, fire up Cloud9, which is their built in Integrated Development Environment (IDE).  To do this, go to <IP_Address>:3000 in your browser:

Once you have the browser up, double click blinkled.js.  This is a simple program that blinks an LED.  To run the program, just click the green play button at the top, next to the word “debug”.

Conclusion

Setting up the BeagleBone is really easy.  In a couple of minutes, we went from opening up the box to running a program that blinks an LED.  Not bad at all.