Hello everyone! I have to drive motors using beagleboard. It was suggested to me to connect the motors to a microcontroller and serially communicate it with beagleboard. But the serial port is busy communicating with the host.
There is some other option to connect motors to beagleborad pins directly.
How to do it? What changes have to be made in the kernel and how?
Isnt there like 3x serial ports (UART) on the beagle board? Perhaps your USB serial port it already talking to your host. However lookup the pins out on the beagleboard.
Specifically look at:
Table 22. Expansion Connector Signals
In: http://beagleboard.org/static/BBxMSRM_latest.pdf
You can use pin muxing and change the control register to allow access to UART 2 on the expansion header. At that point I think you can get access to the UART 2. I have never done this. But this is what I would look at if you need access to another serial port.
Be sure you get the voltage inputs on that header ( think its 3.3v ttl logic serial port)
If you want to just use GPIO (things that can be high or low) you can toss in a few transistors and “switch” them on with something like this:
(Verify this do not just run this)
root@beagleboard:~# Echo “4” > $GPIO/export
typed echo as Echo to stop ppl from just running commands without reading first
I have not done anything that I have just typed before. So you will need to do further research on this. However it should be a starting place. I am not an expert on beagleboards so take my advice as a general idea that should be looked into.
ril3y