Home | Lasersaur Software | BeagleBone Setup | LasaurApp Setup | Firmware Setup

To setup the BeagleBone Black (BBB) install the following disk image on the EMMC. If you know how to do this go ahead and skip the rest of this document. Otherwise find detailed instruction below.

Lasersaur BBB Image v15.01 (md5sum: 65203a255b38fa7abe50913be698253e)

Looking for older files: lasersaur-BBB-image-v13.06.img.xz

This image is a modified elinux.com image based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It has UART1, WiFi, and GPIOs enabled as needed. For details how to roll one from scratch see Howto Create LasaurBBB Image.

The following steps are quite Linux-specific but should work on OSX too. In either way some command line skills do help. To get this working on Windows some decent amount of web-searching may be required.

• Get lasersaur-BBB-image-v15.01.img.xz
• Clone to a micro sd-card.
  • This sd-card must be 2gb or bigger.
  • xz -dc lasersaur-BBB-flasher-v15.01.img.xz | pv -s 2G -peta | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
  • IMPORTANT: Make sure /dev/mmcblk0 is the sd-card, eg. by running sudo fdisk -l before and after you insert the card.
  • Also, you can drop the | pv -s 2G -peta if you don't have it on your system. You won't get a progress indicator so give it some 30min at least.
  • Mount the sd-card and copy the same lasersaur-BBB-image-v15.01.img.xz to /root on the system partition.
    • Make sure to unmount cleanly. For good measure you can call sync before unmounting.
• Connect BBB to your local network.
• Boot BBB from this card.
  • The BBB should automatically boot from the sd-card if inserted. (If not, hold S2 button when connecting power until the four blue LEDs illuminate.)
• At this point you should already have a usable BBB. Continue to install the image on the EMMC (internal flash memory). This will make it boot faster.
• Install disk image to EMMC:
  • ssh to BBB: ssh [email protected]
    • default password is: bone
  • The disk image you copied earlier should be in your home directory. If not you can also scp it there.
  • xz -dc lasersaur-BBB-image-v15.01.img.xz | pv -s 2G -peta | dd of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=1M
    • IMPORTANT: Do not abort the copy process as it may semi-brick your BBB.
  • call sync
  • Depower, remove sd-card, and boot up again.
  • Done!
  • Open http://lasersaur.local

We had to make a minor change to the DriveBoard v13.06 and later after we realized that the BBB does not boot when pin P8:46 is connected to the AVR reset pin. On DriveBoard v13.06 or later this function will be on P8:44. This means that a v13.03 DriveBoard needs to be adapted for use with a BBB.

• cut pin P8:46 on the BeagleBone headers on the DriveBoard. This is the most top-left pin.
• on the rear of the board create a solder bridge between P8:46 and P8:44 (the pin right to it).

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