BBB and USB Pitfalls?

I’m wondering if someone with more experience with the Beaglebone Black can chime in. I’m working on a project which involves a USB hub using the GL850G USB 2.0 hub chipset and some CP2102 USB to UART bridge chips. After not being able to hot plug these components I ran into this GitHub project: https://github.com/osresearch/LEDscape/blob/master/BeagleBone-setup.md At the bottom of this file you can see a section titled “USB Problems” with a small script. After running lsusb -v by hand all my hot plugged devices came up and functioned! Longer test runs shows the USB buss failing after 24 hours or so. I’m also seeing a lot of posts on this forum about USB hub computability, “Babble Interrupt” errors, and some kind of kernel patch for USB.

So my question is what is the status of USB stability with the latest eMMC flasher? (2013.09.07) I’d like to learn more about the kernel and any potential pitfalls before moving forward with the hardware.

Thanks much,
A.J.

9_4 is the latest production version.

Gerald

Flasher image 6_20 is published here: http://beagleboard.org/latest-images and 9_7 here: http://downloads.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beaglebone/ Where can I find 1213_9_4 eMMC flasher that your suggest?

A.J.

At the wiki page listed on that little white card that came in the box with the board. The one nobody seems to be able to find.

Here is the direct link: http://circuitco.com/support/index.php?title=Updating_The_Software

Gerald

Nope that would be to easy.

I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but Koen added a patch last week that may help with the babble interrupt errors. Check it out here:
https://github.com/beagleboard/kernel/commit/46505ea7162720ee8805c8443bf7f10052b9ee7f

Brent,

Thanks for the input. I was able to successfully run a single USB to UART for over 24 hours without failure with the image Gerald pointed out. After adding a second one to the hub I’m getting that babble interrupt. I’ll look into this patch now.

A.J.

Hi A.J., you asked for someone with more experience to chime in … and I may need the same from you.

I’m having trouble with hotplugging at all so would like to first try the “USB Problems” solution you mentioned. Noob question: how do I run that small script?

Also, have you tried any of the USB kernel patches? I’ve been snooping around those, but not having ever applied a kernel patch and not having any luck finding a BBB kernel patch tutorial, I’ve been hesitant to give that a try.

Hi Danny,

First thing to do is flash your BBB with the latest software contained within the link Gerald provided. (Circuit Co. Wiki) That fixed hot swap for me. After that you can schedule the lsusb -v command to run every 5 minutes in crontab. To add to the schedule run “env EDITOR=nano crontab -e” then on a new line paste “*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/lsusb -v > /dev/null 2>&1” and that’ll run it every 5 minutes. But don’t believe me. Google crontab to see how this all works. I’m testing this hack to see if it helps now.

As for patching the kernel leave that to the developers. Compiling an application is a total pain let alone a kernel. (Look up make, configure, automake, and cross compiling for a taste.) Just wait patiently until a newer release is published.

A.J.