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Beagle Bone Black is a low-cost but powerful platform for developers and hobbyists. It is a community supported platform that runs free software distributions of GNU\Linux out of the box. Beagle Bone Black is a member of a series of development boards developed by BeagleBoard.org Foundation, a US-based non-profit corporation. The aim of Beagle Board.org Foundation is promotion of open-source hardware and software in embedded computing.
Besides Gnu\Linux distributions like Debian, Gentoo or Fedora, Beagle Bone Black also supports Free BSD, Windows Embedded CE, QNX, ThreadX and the popular Linux distribution, Android.
The BeagleBone Black comes with a 1GHz Sitara AM3358BZCZ100 processor and a 512MB DDR3L RAM. It has 4GB 8-bit Embedded MMC onboard flash, 20-pin CTI JTAG and a serial header. You can power the BeagleBone Black either over USB, DC Jack or externally from a 5V DC power supply. There is support for ethernet connectivity and serial communication. There are also provisions for video and audio output.
The processor used in BeagleBone Black is a1-GHz Sitara™ARM®Cortex®-A8 32-Bit RISC Processor. It has 176KB of on-chip Boot ROM and 64KB of dedicated RAM. It has 32KB each of L1 data and instruction cache and 256 KB of L2 cache with Error Corrcting Code(ECC). It also has interrupt controller and supports debugging over JTAG. The processor has several features like LCD controller that supports a resolution of upto 2048 × 2048, CAN ports, UART ports, 32 GPIO pins, IPC etc.
BeagleBone Black comes inside a box along with a USB data cable and a card with a few instructions. To get started with the device you need to connect it in either of the two configurations – tethered to a PC or as a standalone desktop. Both these configurations are easily achieved and are gateways to exploring BeagleBone Black.
When tethered to a PC, the BeagleBone Black can be accessed like a USB storage device. Connect the small end of the wire to the microUSB slot of the BeagleBone Black and the other end to the USB slot of your PC. The power LED shall glow indicating that the device is up and running. A series of LEDs begin to blink sequentially indicating the beginning of boot process. When the Linux kernel boots up the LEDs flash in an erratic manner. When the booting process is over the device will appear in your PC as a storage device. Open the folders to view contents and open start.html file on your web browser. Make sure you have either Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Chromium browser because Internet Explorer will not work. A quick start guide opens up that has instructions for you.
As a standalone desktop, BeagleBone Black behaves independent of and not connection to any PC. This configuration requires a 5V power supply or a 5V DC jack because it can no longer draw power over the USB from a PC. You can connect a monitor along with a keyboard and a mouse for complete PC like convenience. Using this setup you can write programs amd work on your projects.
While connecting a monitor make note of its type because if it is a DVD-I monitor you will have to use a DVI-D to HDMI Adapter because BeagleBone Black has HDMI port. Also remember that if you are using wired keyboard and mouse you will have to use a USB HUB to allow the two USB connections. Wireless keyboard and mouse combo can be interface by connecting their receiver to the BeaagleBone Black. Further, you may use your ethernet connectivity by connecting the ethernet cable to the ethernet port of your BeagleBone Black.
When you power up the BeagleBone Black a booting process similar to the one explained on the tethering with PC section is initiated. As the devices boots up this time a mouse pointer may appear on your screen like the way it happens with most Gnu\Linux computers. A login screen will soon appear and people who have used Gnu\Linux in the past may be tempted to enter both the credentials as root but there is no need to do so. Simply wait for a little while and you will see a desktop. BeagleBone Black comes with Debian and you will be now provided with a Gnome 2 desktop environment running on Debian.
BeagleBone devices get timely updates of the software used. You can download the latest Debian images for BeagleBone devices from the site given below.
http://beagleboard.org/latest-images
You will have to download the compressed image file and use a program like 7-Zip to extract the contents. It contains an image of Debian to be written into a microSD card. You can make use of various image writing programs available for both Windows and Gnu\Linux. When done, remove the card and plug it into your BeagleBone Black without turning the power on. Hold the BOOT button and then power it up. Your Beagle Bone Software is updated.
You can create many interesting projects using BeagleBone Black. The official website of BeasgleBoard has a catalogue of some of them. You can have a look at them here.
http://beagleboard.org/project/
One of these projects is converting your BeagleBone Black into a gaming console. Another gaming project is to use the BeagleBone to play Super Nintendo game titles using a GUI front-end. BeagleBone Black is not all about gaming. You can do serious stuff too like making it interact with your environment. An add-on called Sensor Cape from Texas Instruments lets you utilize many sensors in your embedded project. It allows you to use several sensors like gyroscope, accelerometer, light sensors, temperature sensor and others with minimal use of GPIO pins of your BeagleBone Black.
Doing projects with a large number of LEDs is easy with BeagleBone Black. A BeagleBone Black project called octoscroller makes use of a large array of eight panels of 16X32 RGB LED matrix panels to develop a message alert polygon. Not just sensors and LEDs but BeagleBone is also a good platform to do projects involving Web and Java. You can use Oracle's official Java JDK in BeagleBone Black.
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