So, you are driving a relay with a GPIO pin? Do you have something between the GPIO pin and the relay? Like a transistor or something?
Oh, one more question. Which BeagleBoard board are you using?
Gerald
you need ULN2008 between a CPU and a Relay. Otherwise you give too much stress to GPIO when current flows through a relay’s coil. Or if you just drive a relay’s coil from a simple CPU GPIO (1.8V I believe) then this GPIO strength is not enough to drive an electromagnet in the relay.
The -xM puts out 1.8V only. I don’t think that will drive a ULN2008. You need to level shift it to at least 3.3V. You cannot drive a relay direct from the processor.
Gerald
If you look at the -xM schematic, you will see several examples of level shifting that you can copy. Look at the LED drivers.
Gerald
Page 4 of the schematic. Q1A and Q1B. User 0. User 1.
Gerald
That is part of it. You still need a relay driver. I gave you links to two boards you can buy. Buy them, Assemble them. Connect the level translator to the GPIO pin, output of the level translator to the relay board and it will drive the relay. Sorry, but you are going to have to do a little work here and build up some hardware.
Gerald
Good luck and hopefully no smoke!
Gerald