Beaglebone Black setup

I have been wanting to build a simple robot, to roam around the house for some time. I have focused on the brain to start with. A couple of years ago I looked into avr 8-bit microcontroller. The avr chips are easy to write code for and have a lot of features, but they are still just a microcontroller. I wanted something that could run linux and make things like adding wifi easier. Somewhere along the line the Pi came out. I looked at it and found the i/o pins it provided to be limited. After looking some more, I found the Beaglebone Black, which was like the Pi but with a lot more i/o pins.

Excited to find a $45 computer with the features I wanted, I went to order it and found it was out of stock everywhere. After looking around a lot, I found the site adafruit had a sign up for when the Beaglebone Black would be back in stock. I put in my email and 5 days later I order one. A week after that with the cheapest shipping I got my board in the mail.



The Beaglebone Black is about the size of a credit card. The thickness part is the Ethernet port.

With board in hand, I am all ready to see what I have. I hook up the usb cable that came with it and my Ubuntu 12.04 networking manager crashes. After some searches I give up and connect it to my router and power it with a phone charger. Once I find the IP on my router, I just ssh in as root with a blank password. I see it running angstrom linux and uses systemd (more on this later).

A couple of weeks later, I look more into hooking up the usb to Ubuntu and found the solution on adafruit. I just needed to add some udev rules. After adding the udev rules with the script on adafruit, just plugging in the usb boots up the board and adds a eth2 to Ubuntu. Now I can just ssh it the board as

ssh root@192.168.7.2

 At this point, the Beaglebone Black will not be able to access the network without some iptable changes. At this point that is not important to me, I just want to configure the board and I plan to add a wifi usb dongle in the near furture.

Overall, I have been very happy with the Beaglebone Black. I know the Pi has a much larger community, but given the Beaglebone Black is always out of stock I think its community is growing.