Having issues flashing to eMMC

General Discussion
1

Good morning,
I’m trying to flash debian to my very old Beaglebone black (Version A, for use as a node red and mosquitto server). None of the images I’ve tried seem to work. Which is correct?

There are several buttons on the board, S2 seems to be the correct button for the flash,

I can ssh to the board:

root@beaglebone:~/openssl-3.1.1# more /media/BEAGLEBONE/ID.txt 
Cloud9 GNOME Image 2013.05.20

root@beaglebone:~/openssl-3.1.1# more /media/BEAGLEBONE/uEnv.txt 
optargs=quiet drm.debug=7

root@beaglebone:~/openssl-3.1.1# uname -a
Linux beaglebone 3.8.13 #1 SMP Mon May 20 17:07:58 CEST 2013 armv7l GNU/Linux
root@beaglebone:~/openssl-3.1.1#

root@beaglebone:/media/BEAGLEBONE# lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Angstrom
Description:    Angstrom GNU/Linux v2012.12 (Core edition)
Release:        v2012.12
Codename:       Core edition
2

Are you sure you wan to upgrade that board? I mean the OS is 10 years old at this point! Save it for a museum!

Okay, jokes aside… You need to hold the Boot button down, insert power, wait for an led, then lift you finger… (finger nail works best)…

bbb-button
bbb-button1712×1008 168 KB

Regards,

3

This one is the REV B board, which seems to be a 2gb, not 4gb eMMC card.

Use the Debian image for the 1gb? Since the newer stuff won’t fit?

4

That would be the safe bet.

Honestly, I really don’t test on the 2GB eMMC, the ‘iot’ may actually fit…

Most of the time, i don’t personally bother with the eMMC…

Just to repeat for other what i said discord:

in theory the iot should fit, even thou i list them as 4gb images… the 2GB eMMC is really about 1.8GB after formatting, node-red installed is 179MB… yeah, just grab the minimal image: Debian 11.x (Bullseye) - Monthly Snapshot - 2023-10-07 and install node-red and mosquito…

[12:58 PM]
We ship node-red 3.0.2 ready to go, with: sudo apt update ; sudo apt install bb-node-red-installer and then: sudo systemctl enable --now nodered

Regards,

5

I’m running the eMMC flash version now. I’ve got it on a lab bench power supply. I notice this time it’s drawing 0.4 amps instead of 0.3(ish).
One light of the four on continuously. Hopefully this works!

6

Just can’t get this thing to flash. I’ll just get something newer. Thanks for your help though

root@beaglebone:~# lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Angstrom
Description: Angstrom GNU/Linux v2012.12 (Core edition)
Release: v2012.12
Codename: Core edition

7

Do you have a serial usb debugger plugged into J1?

The trick is power, as long as the board has power, the bootrom will not re-read the bootsel pins.

So order matters…

  1. Un-Power board, nothing connected, and i mean nothing (besides j1 usb uart)…
  2. Plug in “Flasher” microSD…
  3. Use Finger nail and hold down button - do not lift off finger…
  4. Insert power
  5. Wait for LED…
  6. Finally lift finger nail.
  7. cylon pattern
  8. shutoff
  9. <>
  10. profit…

Regards,