RoadTest: Beaglebone Bundle: BBB, Wireless Cape & Display
Author: sakthi.1260
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Development Boards & Tools
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?: Raspberry Pi 3
What were the biggest problems encountered?: Loading up the new firmware. Using the Connectivity Cape
Detailed Review:
Hello Guys,
Another Package from e14, this time a damage carton wondering what happened inside.
What do I have now?
Its the BeagleBone Black, Wireless Cape and LCD cape.
Inside the boxes we have ESD Sealed BeagleBone Black, Manual along with USB Mini Cable (most of developer boards never comes with connectivity cable, this one does) , The Wireless Connectivity cape and manual, The LCD, Baseboard and Manual.
Although things were nicely and protectively packed the BeagleBone Black didn't give the joyfulness of holding a new piece of hardware, there were scratches over the PCB, USB and Ethernet ports which actually pulls down your excitement for a new hardware.
On the other hand the wireless connectivity cape and LCD cape were perfect and shining in my hand.
The Wireless Cape seems to be manufactured by the Chinese PCB manufacturer "Fast Print" last year(2016).
After trying to load the latest Debian into beaglebone for a full day went through the documentations, found that for flashing need to edit the uEnv.txt inside the boot folder to flash the eMMC.
Procedure can be found here.
And finally was able to flash it with the Debian 9 or Stetch, thanks to the serial debug header at least I could see it was happening.
Well most of us know about the BeagleBone Black so if you are looking for that part it is covered at the last of this Roadtest, my main interest was the LCD and Wireless cape.
The LCD is actually two parts the Base board with the EEPROM and two ZIF FPC connectors, and the LCD with Flex.
Although the Flex was sturdy and masked with kepton tapes on both the sides, the region where flex joins with the LCD gave a feeling of insecurity, even a small shake over there, the color deteriorated.
A LCD with a Flex may not be easy to handle but this actually helps when you want to fold and place it in an enclosure. I folded and flipped it to test it out.
The LCD is Actually a 4.3" TFT with capacitive touch LED back lit and a resolution of 480x272 RGB type display. The LCD alone weighs about an smart phone with a dimension of 68
The board also has an EEPROM, the BeagleBone reads data and understands its an LCD cape.
Visibility was great even in bright light, and nice brightness in dark.
I was like totally happy with the touch performance was almost the same kind of experience with my DellComputers S2240T touch monitor. It also supports gestures like pinch zooming and panning.
Getting into color and details, it was more than my expectation with a good contrast and clarity cant expect more out of a 480x272 display.
I wont say this is the best display I've ever seen but definitely this one has a place in my list best 10 portable LCDs.
This is something interesting, a lot of headers and jumpers.
What does the board have?
All from Texas Instruments.
Cape also has on board Antennas for Bluetooth, WiFi and Zigbee, a Zigbee debug header, a terminal for NFC antenna.
This little UFL connector is missing over the board, but I could see 3 solder pads for it.
Well this one I couldn't make it work, I tried the older Debian, the Latest one too still no improvement, Although it has multi wireless protocols on board it lacks proper documentations, the only thing I could found in that user manual was the initial setup which led to no success.
Couldn't even find appropriate example where this cape has been put to use. This cape is a total disaster until a complete documentation resources are provided.
Would be great if any of you guys have seen this cape working anywhere, kindly share me the link.
Size is somewhat similar to the Rpi weighs around 50gm, and a lot of GPIOs to play with.
1 - Ethernet Port
1 - Mini USB for PC connectivity and Power.
A DC Barrel Socket for 5VDC input.
1 - Power Button
1 - Board Reset Button
4 - USER Definable LEDS, Comes predefined for notifications (SD Card access eMMC access etc)
on the other side we have
1 USB Host
Micro HDMI Out
Reverse Mount Micro SD Card Slot. These slots actually doesn't lock the card they just eject it out like the ones in our mobiles, a gentle pull will release the card.
Boot Switch and
2 46 Pin Dual Row Header on Both the sides, for GPIOs and Power Pins.
eMMC and SDRAM are from Kingston, HDMI framer by NXP Semiconductors, Ethernet PHY by SMSC or now Microchip. Thanks to the well documented community saved me a lot of time over editing photos and typing.
All GPIOs are strictly 3V3 Logic, and Analog Inputs are at a maximum of 1.8V (12 bit) with a very less protection for the GPIOs. From the BBB's Wiki page
This is crucial you need to make sure all your auxiliary devices and boards gets power only after booting.
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The board takes nearly 45s to completely boot Debian Stretch and at idle stage 23% of the CPU was used and around 110Mb out of 485Mb of the available RAM was used.
Putting into performance testing, I just tried how easy it was to program the board, I used cloud9 IDE to blink some LEDs,
I used the best cable I have, and download speed was around 1Mbps (I'm like using a 75Mbps fiber connection with absolutely no loss) but 1Mbps is decent for an IoT Device over ethernet.
The USB Host and micro HDMI are so close that you need to force fit your devices or converter
Even if you gonna use those expansion cables they are going to be under tension.
I used one of the top quality videos (1080p) to check if the processor could handle it
It was butter smooth except a few places where I experienced jitters.
The Board actually gets a bit hot just on a idle run for 10mins so if you are planning to use this for some hardcore processing an tiny heat sink will enhance the life.
Multiple OS Supports that including Ubuntu(I tried the video playback with it), Android and what I found was a version of compatible Kali Linux distribution, soon with some more additional software this board is gonna transform into palm sized penetration tester although I planned to use it in different way.
Reasons to consider spending a few more bucks on the BeagleBone Black over the little more powerful RPi3 that comes with on board Wifi and Bluetooth.
More control over you Hardware
Many GPIOs to Play with
on board eMMC of 4GB
Open Source Hardware
What I felt was the board can be a little larger more spacious around the ports, and an extra USB Host with a total of 1GB of RAM would be definitely worth the buy.
The only disadvantage would be lack of sufficient documents for certain capes, and this is where your development process becomes a burden.
Cheers,
Sakthi
Top Comments
nice. Glad this all worked out fine for you.
I have a real time computing cape (o how I hate that name) for the BB. (bought it for the BB that I got from you)
I'm still stuck at the lack of documentation…
I like your review sakthi.1260
I have the first gen LCD cape display and there was nothing but issues. It wouldn't work with any OS except for the demo it came with. Like Jan Cumps, I too have spent…
Happens Jan, I too have got struck a lot of time (mostly) investing into hardware that lacks documents and have spent sleepless nights trying to figure out things.