This is some information to help me remember what I’m doing with a BeagleBone Black Wireless. This is intended to be the core of a custom piece of battery powered hardware and as such we need fast boot time, low power consumption, no X-Windows, no HDMI, etc.
Sources of information
I’m basing this work on https://jumpnowtek.com/beaglebone/BeagleBone-Systems-with-Yocto.html but also needed https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/hardware_and_creative/9781785289736/1/ch01lvl1sec11/let-s-build-for-beaglebone since the JumpNowTek instructions didn’t quite work. I wanted to use Yocto because this https://embexus.com/2017/05/16/embedded-linux-fast-boot-techniques/ implies I should be able to get the resulting image to boot in under 1 second.
Build Host and Process
My normal development host is a MacBook Pro but that doesn’t have an SD-Card slot so for this project I’ve taken an older Intel i5 HP laptop and installed Ubuntu 18.04 on that. I then use XQuartz on the Mac to run X-Terms on the Ubuntu system. The Beaglebone is connected to that laptop by FTDI serial cable for the console and USB for power.
To Do
- Support Ethernet over USB since a colleague uses that to update the app.
- Get a BootP server running so I can try different Root OS setups without using the SD Card.