The BeagleBone Black is a versatile single-board computer that opens up a world of possibilities for development projects. In this blog, I will guide you through the process of setting up the BeagleBone Black for development purposes and share my progress from the first week of exploration. Let’s dive in!

Setting Up the BeagleBone Black
  1. Download the non-flasher recommended debian image from the beagleboard website.
WARNING

Do not use a “Flasher” image, which can be identified by sequential blinkning of the leds generally.

  1. Flash the Debian image to the microSD card using image writing software Balena Etcher

  2. Insert the microSD card into the BeagleBone Black’s card slot. Connect the power supply to the board and wait for it to boot up.

  3. The board will power down once the flashing is over.

Setting up the network

  1. Connect the Board to your host using USB

  2. Access the BeagleBone Black by opening a terminal or command prompt and establish an SSH connection to the BeagleBone Black using this script

  3. The default password is: temppwd

My Week 1 progress

During the first week of exploration with the BeagleBone Black, I focused on familiarizing myself with the board and implementing basic examples.

  • Basic PRU Examples.

I flashed some basic examples from the PRU Cookbook onto the PRU cores.

Its the “hello world” example of the embedded world. Both PRU cores of a Beaglebone Black are started to toggle GPIOs. PRU0 core is programmed in C, while the firmware for PRU1 core is written in assembler.

  • Learning PRU Assembly

I dedicated time to learn about PRU assembly, which involved understanding the syntax, instructions, and registers.