Hi,
Is it just me, or is the BCF documentation extremely undocumented currently?
It is extremely unusable. Here’s the process I went through, and my opinions/thoughts so far:
I went to the latest BCF Documentation page.
The page contains the title " Enable a Linux host with BeagleConnect", but there is zero information on how to do that.
No prob I thought - let me go to the “Demos & tutorials” that are in the contents on the left side menu. That ought to help I thought. I select “Beginner”. The page is titled
Using Micropython so that sounded excellent. I’m very familiar with MicroPython on the Pi Pico.
The page states that the BCF is flashed with MicroPython by default, and has an example that uses “mcumgr” but it doesn’t state where to obtain that! It’s not in my Ubuntu installation by default.
Fine, I’ll skip that, and try “tio /dev/ttyACM0”. That doesn’t work either; I see the message “Press ctrl-t q to quit”, but no “Connected” message. Pressing the reset button doesn’t help either.
Ok, I’ll backtrack. Maybe I should read the “Quick Start Guide”
Hm, that has a large video, which has zero useful information for me - it’s an unboxing. I have already unboxed the BCF and attached the antenna. At this point I’m confused, how come the least useful information has been completed, but not the more interesting “Tethering to PC” or “Access MicroPython” as mentioned.
I’m a reasonably competent person, I don’t need to be spoon-fed, and yet I’m having extreme difficulty in moving the BCF from a useless black box into something usable.
Could someone paste in some information into the documentation pages, that will help users like me?
It could even be a very rough 5-minute video showing me where to get documentation and how to power up the BCF and get it doing “something” (get it doing anything!).
The BCF is officially on sale, it’s not a hobby or early prototype project, it’s a proper for-sale released product. It’s not too much to ask for some documentation to be ready at this point.
If I’ve got the wrong end of the stick and it’s not supposed to be on sale yet, or if I’m using the wrong URLs for information, please let me know.
This is really not a good look for what should be a flagship product from BeagleBoard. I’m sorry to say it’s not the first time either; documentation has always been a problem with BeagleBoard products.