Beaglebone Black eQEP

I’m trying to get quadrature encoder signals into my new Beaglebone Black board.
I have a Rev. C BBB running:
Linux beaglebone 3.8.13-bone47 #1 SMP Fri Apr 11 01:36:09 UTC 2014 armv7l GNU/Linux

*** 1st question:
I understand that recent Debian distributions on the BBB have eQEP drivers included.
Does the above version have the eQEP drivers?
If not, which version do I need?

*** 2nd question:
I copied the pre-compiled dtbo files from here:
https://github.com/Teknoman117/beaglebot/tree/master/encoders/dts
to /lib/firmware as explained in the readme file.
The files I copied are:
bone_eqep0-00A0.dtbo
bone_eqep1-00A0.dtbo
bone_eqep2-00A0.dtbo
bone_eqep2b-00A0.dtbo

Problem is when I issue this command:
root@beaglebone:/sys/devices/bone_capemgr.9# echo bone_eqep2b > /sys/devices/bone_capemgr.9/slots
-bash: echo: write error: Invalid argument
you can see it gives me an invalid argument error.
And I don’t see the slots file change to indicate that it has loaded the eQEP driver.
This is what I see in the slots file:
0: 54:PF—
1: 55:PF—
2: 56:PF—
3: 57:PF—
4: ff:P-O-L Bone-LT-eMMC-2G,00A0,Texas Instrument,BB-BONE-EMMC-2G
5: ff:P-O-L Bone-Black-HDMI,00A0,Texas Instrument,BB-BONELT-HDMI

Do you know what I’m doing wrong?

Thanks,
Kirk

It was added in "bone48"

https://github.com/RobertCNelson/bb-kernel/commit/b7bc988c048b69f03b71c72f7c544f2348f378d0

either upgrade or grab the latest release.

http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack_Debian#Debian_Releases

Regards,

I’m a newbie at Linux so bear with me.

Are you saying it would be possible to upgrade to add the eQEP support without wiping the BBB clean and installing the latest Linux relase?

If so can you please point to documentation on how to do that?

I’ve installed a few libraries and configured some things for WiFi and it would be nice not to have to do that all again.

Thanks for your help
Kirk