New Owner: BeagleBoard Black industrial and Seeed BeagleBoard green Help

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1

I acquired a unit from work that has the following (decommissioned machines):

Board 1 - Seeed Studio BeagleBoard green - with LCD and touchscreen attached
Board 2 - BeagleBoard Black industrial - headless breakout board but it has a HDMI port (nothing happens when I boot with it connected)

I’m used to working with Raspberry Pi and Arduinos but the beaglebone tweaked my interest. I’d like to get these units to a ‘usable’/understandable graphical interface before I develop uses for them. I have no idea how to do this.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/y85CDxPYzyg2s7yS9

As I understand it the BeagleBoard has a built in eMMC that can hold the software image to boot. In my attempts to get them back to stock I may have overwritten them. \

Goal: Get them back to running a ‘stock’ graphical interface or similar. I’m at a bit of a loss on what needs to be done as these are foreign devices to me. I kind of understand what they are capable of but I don’t have a specific project for them, yet. I’m wandering aimlessly trying to get them back to stock.

I’ll bring my serial adapter from work on Monday 2/15/2021 to see what that gets me.

Help me get back to ‘square 1’ and I’ll go from there.

2

Hello,

I think setting up a new image on both boards would be the first thing to do. Try w/ SD Card first, erase the eMMC, and update && upgrade, git pull in /opt/scripts/tools/ and then sudo ./update_kernel.sh would be the command to update the board to the newest kernel.

Then, one would need to update and/or add the correct overlay in /boot/uEnv.txt.

Seth

3

I acquired a unit from work that has the following (decommissioned
machines):

Board 1 - Seeed Studio BeagleBoard green - with LCD and touchscreen attached

  I'm not up-to-date on BBG, so can't help with recommended images...

Board 2 - BeagleBoard Black industrial - headless breakout board but it has
a HDMI port (nothing happens when I boot with it connected)

  Presuming this is equivalent to a regular BBB but with extended thermal
range, then...

I'm used to working with Raspberry Pi and Arduinos but the beaglebone
tweaked my interest. I'd like to get these units to a
'usable'/understandable graphical interface before I develop uses for them.
I have no idea how to do this.

As I understand it the BeagleBoard has a built in eMMC that can hold the
software image to boot. In my attempts to get them back to stock I may have
overwritten them. \

  Simplest is probably to start with a current /flasher/ image to
overwrite the eMMC. The IoT Flasher image at
Latest Software Images - BeagleBoard is a bit old, but also established as
a "production release" image. Otherwise you are looking at something like
the "bone-emmc-flasher" image at
https://rcn-ee.net/rootfs/bb.org/testing/2021-02-08/buster-iot/

NOTE: make sure you have a board with a 4GB eMMC -- some of the earliest
BBB boards had only a 2GB eMMC and most modern images won't fit that.

  Burn the image to a uSD card of 4+GB.
  Insert card in BBB
  HOLD DOWN the Boot Select button (the one nearest to the uSD slot) and
(while holding the button down) apply 5V power to the barrel connector (do
NOT rely upon USB power when flashing the eMMC)

  Ideally, the board should start a Larson scanner (cylon/Knight Rider)
pattern on the blue LEDs. Wait for that to stop and the board shuts down.

  Remove uSD card, reapply power (this time, the power button -- next to
Ethernet connector -- itself should be enough to turn the card back on). It
should boot with the new image.

  Note that the flasher images tend to Internet-of-Things oriented -- no
graphical interface. The images with a graphical interface will have LXQT
in the file name. It IS possible to turn those images into flasher images
(just requires editing one line in the /boot/uEnv.txt file -- but you need
a Linux system to mount the uSD card on, Windows doesn't handle EXTn file
systems) -- however, putting an LXQT image on a 4GB eMMC leaves barely
enough room on which to run apt update/apt upgrade (and, if the image is
too old, apt will fail as there isn't enough free space to buffer the new
stuff). Better to install the LXQT image on an 8+GB uSD card, insert the
card, and reboot the BBB (flashing with a new image should update u-Boot
enough to no longer need the boot select button to load an OS from uSD card
-- if the card is present, it will use it instead of the OS on eMMC). Then
run the scripts to "expand" the 4GB image to use the entire uSD card space.

  The BBG may use the same procedure, and maybe even the same images. I
can't confirm.

4

Thanks. I’m doing that now. Board one (Red black board) boots to login. HDMI is working. Yay. Now I’ve got to figure out where the USB ports go. This custom break-out board has 4 USB ports but none of them connect to the main USB-A port. That goes to a 4-pin header that of course are a different pitch than that connector I have on-hand. I’ve another one somewhere in this mess. I’ll just plug it into the network and use ssh.

For the other board (Seeed Beaglebone) what are the chances the LCD touchscreen goes to the pins and will work once flashed?

Green board in the pictures:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/y85CDxPYzyg2s7yS9

I should have 2 more units to play with tomorrow. Now I just need to figure out what I’m going to do with them.

5

Hello,

LCDs work on either/or. Both boards have access to LCD pins: https://beagleboard.org/Support/bone101 . That page will show you every available pinout.

Seth

P.S. If you are looking to hardware pins to a LCD display or use the Cape headers on the Cape, either/or will work too. I know the Seeed BeagleBone Green (or BBG wireless) has some functionality that makes it so you have to encounter some /boot/uEnv.txt changes (commenting or vice versa) in that file.

…

Since you have many peripherals dedicated to the am335x, I am sure you can figure out all sorts of stuff to do! Also, there is a config-pin program one can use to alter pin modes, e.g. config-pin p9.16 pwm and/or gpio for that specific pin.
I also noticed overlays are just .dts and .dtbo files etched into time on the BBB family of boards. You can find more on that here: https://github.com/beagleboard/bb.org-overlays/tree/master/src/arm .

6

My apologies if I’m bugging but here’s the latest:

What I started out Knowing

Unit 1: Beaglebone Black with HDMI port - that was easy to get working via a eMMC flash, it has a custom breakout board that I’m still working on figuring out the pinouts (there’s 4 USB connectors and 2 Serial connections), but HMDI works so that’s good. USB mouse/keyboard not so much.

Unit 2: Seeed Studio Beaglebone Green with touchscreen LCD - I have 3 of these, I’ve flashed 1 via eMMC flash, it worked ( I can access it via ssh on my network) but LCD/touchscreen does not work, that’s a problem

This unit has a custom breakout board attached is as Santek ST1020I3Y-RBSLW-F2 LCD via a qhtb3a board (that’s what I could figure out from the silkscreens). Google wasn’t very helpful.

What I know now
Unit 2 is a 10.1" LCD with touchscreen,. 1 USB port, 1 network port, 2 Serial ports. On stock units the network port would get me a custom VNC session and a locked down web server. The serial ports didn’t react to basic commands (me smashing the enter key via puTTY). The web server gave me basic upload/download to a pre-configured directory. I am able to download arbitrary files if I have permission and know the name. The web server doesn’t run as root.

From what I understand I need to modify the uEnv.txt to enable the LCD and touchscreen. But I have no idea what I should put in there.

What do I want to accomplish?

I want to figure out what this LCD cape is or what the uEnv.txt* file is on a stock unit. I tried capturing a video of the boot sequence but that didn’t provide any seemingly useful info, unless you know something I should look for.

At this point I don’t completely understand the uEnv.txt file and what options I can put in, on a stock beaglebone image, to try and get this LCD cape to work. I tried searching for beaglebone and LCD cape but that hasn’t keyed me in on what I need to do.

Hints, tricks, tips, accepted.

*If you’ve read this far and decided that I’m really not trying to steal I.P. and I like to tinker, here’s what I did figure out. I’m a little bit surprised I was able to use the built file download to download arbitrary files. Unfortunately /etc/shadow is locked to root so no getting the keys to the kingdom.
htttp:///download.cgi?fname=…/…/…/boot/uEnv.txt

gets me this (I was hoping for something more explicit like “LCD is XXXX”, unless you know something I don’t and have a tip):

uname_r=4.4.70-bone-rt-r17 cmdline=fsck.mode=force fsck.repair=yes coherent_pool=1M quiet cape_universal=enable uenv_root=PARTUUID=9d0be788-8e92-374a-910f-5d3b1bedce3c