Does BBB has a connection bridge for Arduino shields?

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1

I’m considering to automate my garden and herbs’ irrigation and I started to learn more about the Open Hardware movement.
I noticed that the Arduino community (older) seems to have more shields which I think can enrich the experience and projects with open hardware.

So, doing a quick research seems to me that BeagleBone Black (BBB) suits me better for the project I’ve in mind. But I would like also to add many sensors and motors (as valves) and I think I understood that BBB is capable of dealing with other boards working as expansions, the capes. But I couldn’t find Capes that would satisfy my needs.

I’ve seen that Raspberry Pi has a “Raspberry Pi to Arduino shields connection bridge”, where is possible (using the libraryarduPi) to make use of the Arduino’s vast number os shields…

So, What I want to know is if there is any anything like that to BeagleBone Black already done, or on going projects in this direction or if there is any intention in the community to such thing.

Thanks for your attention, and I apologize for anything that might have misspelled, and so on.

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Nothing exactly as you describe.

Gerald

3

I think the easiest thing to do would be to use a real Arduino as the bridge, connected to the BBB by USB. Certainly it would be cheaper than any specialised bridge pcb. You wouldn’t need to worry about level-shifting for the GPIOs, and in many cases you’d be able to reuse existing Arduino code to do the work of driving the shield.

4

Tim, thanks a lot for your time. It was a precious answer.

So it is possible to couple the BBB and Arduino?

And how the Arduino communicates and recieves commands from the BBB? Is there a special protocol to use or what?

Is there a detailed guide on how to use BBB with Arduino and its shields?
Seems an interesting idea and saves, yes a lot of effort, to reuse the existing codes, etc.

5

Mathias,
I’m running Debian on my Beagle, so beware that some of the following details may be different under Angstrom linux.

If you connect an ordinary Arduino Uno to the USB-host port it will appear as device /dev/ttyACM0. You can open this device as an ordinary serial port and transfer data to/from the Arduino as you would on a PC. You can even run the Arduino IDE on the Beagle and compile and upload new Arduino code.

You may need to give yourself permission to access the serial devices, eg:

`
$ sudo usermod -a -G tty tim
$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout tim

`

You can also connect other types of Arduino. For example, the cheaper Arduino Pro has no USB-to-serial chip, so you would connect the Arduino’s serial pins to one of the BBB’s UARTs via the P8 or P9 connectors. The Beagle I/O runs at 3.3V, so do this you would need a 3.3V/8MHz Arduino Pro or a level converter.

There are lots of people doing this kind of thing with the Raspberry Pi, so you might find more information searching for Arduino + Raspberry Pi.