Chapter 5: BeagleBone Black Setup for Development - tshakthipradeep/BBB GitHub Wiki

Now let's look at how to setup BBB for development purposes.

Power Supply

There are two ways in which BBB can be powered.

1. 5VDC, 1A, 2.1mm, CENTER POSITIVE adapter. The power supply is not supplied with the board.
2. USB Cable

USB cable was supplied with the BeagleBone Black Rev C. I am assuming it is supplied with the other revisions too. The connector on the board is a mini USB type B female connector and requires a mini USB type B male mating connector.

If you plan to use any cape you may need higher amperage. Not sure if USB cable or a 1A DC power supply will do. So depending on what you plan to connect get a DC power supply of appropriate amperage.

DC Power Adapter

USB Cable

Debug Port

There are multiple debug options.

Option 1. Connect USB FTDI Cable TTL-232R-3V3 to **Debug Serial Header** (J1) on BBB

This is the best way to access the console. This will give you access to both U-Boot and Linux console. When you connect FTDI Cable to your host system, your host system will create /dev/ttyUSB0 device node.

Option 2. Connect USB Cable to BBB's USB device port

This approach has some limitations. When you connect USB cable to the USB device port of BBB and power up the board, when Linux kernel comes up USB Gadget CDC and RNDIS driver kicks in and emulates a serial port and Ethernet interface.

Once the kernel is up and running on the target, your host system will create /dev/ttyACM0 device node and an ethx interface. You can run ifconfig in your host system to check the ethx details.

Use the following settings when you open /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyACM0 using a terminal program.

Speed(baud): 115200
Data Bits: 8
Stop bits: 1
Parity: None
Flow Control None

There are multiple vendors who make USB to UART cables. You may refer to the link below for instructions on how to connect these cables to the Debug Serial Header of BBB.

http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBone_Black_Serial