Setting up a BeagleBone Green Wireless

General Discussion
1

I just got a BeagleBone Green Wireless and I found a lot of outdated information on the web about how to set it up. So here’s what worked for me.

  1. Out of the box, the eMMC was flashed with Debian 8 aka “jessie”. Current stable is Debian 12 aka “bookworm”. So you will need to reflash the eMMC if you want something newer. The Debian 12 “bookworm” images are here: Debian 12.x (Bookworm) - Monthly Snapshot - 2023-10-07.

  2. Flash the eMMC-flasher image to a microSD card with Balena Etcher. Insert the card in the board’s SD slot with the power off. Hold down the USER button and power up the board. You can release the button once the blue LEDs start flashing. The flashing process will take some time and the blue LEDs will scan rapidly. When the flashing is done the board will shut down. You can remove the SD card once the board shuts down.

  3. Connect the board to a host computer via USB and power it up. Once it comes up, the standard ways of connecting still work - over USB serial or by browsing to 192.168.7.2:9090. Then you need to connect to WiFi. Those directions are here for Debian 12: Debian 12.x (Major Changes).... NCM only, iwd for wifi..

  4. Update Debian via sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. This takes a while, since the snapshots were taken in October of 2023. If your application can live in the 4 GB of eMMC on the board, you’re done.

Mine can’t, though - I generate a lot of audio files. One CD is about 0.7 GB! So I have to make a bootable SD card. I used a 128 GB card. Here’s the process:

  1. Flash the non-eMMC-flasher image to the card with Balena Etcher.

  2. Insert the card to a powered-down board and boot it the same way you did for flashing the eMMC. It will also take some time and power off when it’s finished. But this time you leave the SD card in the slot.

  3. Connect to the host, configure the WiFi and update Debian as above.

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