Beaglebone Black (BBB) is a fascinating low cost, open source, community supported development platform that let us develop interesting embedded applications with ease. It is powered with Texas Instruments AM3358 32-bit ARM microprocessor and it runs linux, android and couple of other operating systems. It is a tiny computer (tiny in size not in capabilities) that can be used for developing multimedia applications, it can be used for input output programming by connecting external peripherals for building embedded applications. You can use internet on it as it comes with an Ethernet port. You have a USB host and a USB client on it as well.

The best thing about BBB is its ease of use. It comes with a small USB cable which you can plug into your computer and connect it to the USB client of BBB and that’s it. Beaglebone wakes up and is ready to use! You can now program it using a web based programming platform – Cloud9 IDE. Beaglebone Black has a 4GB of internal memory that comes with Linux Angstrom Distribution & Linux drivers. When you connect it to the computer, it boots Linux and operates as a flash driver providing you with a local copy of the documentation and drivers. Using a web browser (chrome or firefox) you can browse to the web server running on your BBB. There you can access all the capabilities of the bone. You may now program it using Cloud9, connect external peripherals to it and build embedded applications. Another interesting thing about the bone is the BoneScript library - it has several functions that are useful for interacting with your hardware and making the programming very easy, simple & handy.

The reason I am talking about Beaglebone Black today in this article is because recently faculty of our department had an opportunity to have hands-on experience with it. We were recently introduced to Beaglebone Black by one of the renowned professors who is been working with the beagles (Beagleboard, Beagleboard-XM, Beaglebard White, Beaglebone Black) for a very long time now.He is Prof. Dr. Mark Yoder from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, USA. He is an expert in the area of embedded processing and he has been conducting various workshops on beagles in association with Texas Instruments.We were fortunate to learn the concepts of embedded processing using Beaglebone Black from him during the half day faculty development program he conducted on October 10, 2015 in Texas Instruments Lab of our university.

During the half day program we booted Linux on BBB. Then we did input output programming using Cloud9 IDE. We used JavaScript for programming. Prof. Yoder gave us a complete overview of the hardware and software configuration of BBB. While explaining the capabilities of BBB, he talked about various advantages of BBB as an embedded processing platform. In the end he demonstrated a small project on RGB LED Matrix Display using BBB.

We are in debt to Prof. Mark Yoder for getting us started on this fascinating platform. Thanks are due to Dr. Rajnish Sharma, Dean Academics, Chitkara University for organizing such useful session with Prof. Mark Yoder.

Participants posing for a group photograph

By- Sagar Juneja, Research Associate, Chitkara University

References
http://beagleboard.org/