Teach your BBB a new trick: single cable, full GUI operation

Hi all,

I wanted to tell you about a nifty little trick that I figured out which allows you to play/develop on your BeagleBone Black using the full GUI over a single cable. The idea is simple. You use the USB cable to the BBB to power the board and connect it to your laptop and then run a VNC remote desktop over that connection. The configuration is quite straight forward. I have instructions available here. The result is that you just hang the BBB off your laptop with a single USB cable and you don’t need a keyboard, mouse or display cable. In fact, this opens up the USB port for a (hopefully low power draw) USB WiFi dongle. It is really handy when you are on the go, or don’t have network/keyboard/display available and want to use your BBB GUI. I’m rather addicted to it already. Have Altoids tin, will travel. The blog post describes how to do this on Angstrom, but it is likely relatively similar in other flavors.

http://digitaldiner.blogspot.com/2013/05/quick-hint-for-beaglebone-black-user.html

BTW, this is all made possible thanks to the cool design of the BBB. As far as I know this is not possible on a Raspberry PI because you can’t run a virtual network connection over the USB connection to your device…

Enjoy,
-roger

That's pretty clever! I need to try that.

nicely done, but let me make a suggestion for future tutorials by
anyone -- have a more descriptive title so it's more easily searchable
and more obvious what it's about. a title of "Quick hint for
Beaglebone Black user" doesn't really emphasize the subject, and you
definitely want folks to be able to search for it.

rday