Fr

ee

The BeagleBone is an ultra-small, cost-effective computer

that comes with powerful hardware. It runs a fully-fledged
Debian Linux OS and provides numerous electronics
solutions. It gives you all the benefits of a Linux kernel,
such as multitasking, multi-users, and extensive device
driver support. It allows you to program in many languages,
including high-level languages such as JavaScript
and Python.
This book aims to exploit the hardware and software
capabilities of the BeagleBone to create real-life electronics
and Internet of Things (IoT) applications quickly. It is divided
into two parts. The first part covers JavaScript programs.
The second part provides electronics projects and IoT
applications in Python. Starting with the basics needed
to set up the BeagleBone and Cloud9 IDE, this book
covers interfacing with various electronics components
via simple programs. Finally, the book helps you create
some real-life IoT applications.

Who this book is written for

Connect your BeagleBone to a computer

in different ways and get Cloud9 IDE
running to quickly start programming
on the BeagleBone
Get to know BeagleBone extension pins,
such as GPIO, and how to connect various
electronic components to the BeagleBone
Read and write to various electronic
components, such as LEDs, push buttons,
sensors, and motors

Handle data to and from various

BUS-supporting modules, such as UART,
I2C, and SPI, using the Adafruit BBIO
Python library

P U B L I S H I N G

C o m m u n i t y

Write real-life IoT applications in JavaScript

and Python, such as sending an e-mail
on overheat and controlling a servo
motor remotely
Make use of free online cloud services to
store and analyze sensor data collected
on the BeagleBone

$ 29.99 US
19.99 UK

community experience distilled

pl

Grasp in-depth theory on Analog, PWM,

and BUS programming and the electronic
components used in programs

Yogesh Chavan

This book is for anyone who wants to learn programming

on embedded systems and understand key concepts such
as GPIO, PWM, and Bus. It is intended for programming
beginner who is willing to work on electronics projects
and basic IoT applications. This book will be helpful
to BeagleBone owner who wants to quickly implement
small-scale home automation solutions. Some hands on is
expected on C or Python. Some familiarity with electronics
is helpful. However, it is not essential.

What you will learn from this book

Programming the BeagleBone

Programming the
BeagleBone

Sa
m

D i s t i l l e d

Programming the
BeagleBone
Harness the power of BeagleBone from blinking LEDs to Internet
of Things applications

Prices do not include

local sales tax or VAT
where applicable

Visit www.PacktPub.com for books, eBooks,

code, downloads, and PacktLib.

E x p e r i e n c e

Yogesh Chavan

In this package, you will find:

The author biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Cloud9 IDE'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Programming the BeagleBone

About the Author

Yogesh Chavan is a Linux enthusiast and open source promoter, living in Pune,

India. He has now been teaching operating systems, device drivers, and embedded
systems in colleges and institutes for more than three years. These include the
computer science department of Pune University, Symbiosis Institute of Computer
Studies and Research (SICSR) college, and the Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (C-DAC) institute. He has about six years of experience in the software
industry. His previous industrial role was of a software maintenance engineer at Red
Hat Software Services.
Yogesh has overseen many engineering projects under GEEP (http://www.
geeksofpune.in). He has given many talks at the annual open source event,
GNUnify (http://gnunify.in).
Yogesh enjoys cutting edge technologies. He is a hardware hobbyist who likes
playing with smartphones, tablets, routers, and Arduino. He is big fan of Android
and various Linux distributions. He has compiled and modified kernel and
firmwares for many phones and routers. He wishes to be a humble contributor
to the open source world.

Preface
The whole world is moving from desktop/computers to smartphones/embedded
systems. We are at the door to Internet of Things (IoT). The number of Internet
connected users crossed 3.2 billion in 2015, which is almost half of the total
population. The number of connected devices has exceeded the number of humans
already. IoT is going to bring a combination of solutions, mixing physical world and
digital world. We will interact with the digital world in newer ways than keyboard
and mouse. Everyday objects will have logic in them to do their work in a better
way. Multiple things will work collectively in order to achieve better results. IoT will
bring lot many possibilities and opportunities along.
IoT implementation needs power-efficient embedded system solutions. There has
been an exponential rise in the demand of the embedded systems in the last few
years. Therefore, there is a demand for embedded programming as well. Embedded
development boards such as BeagleBone play a key role here. These boards provide
opportunities to new programmers to get their hands on ARM-based embedded
systems. BeagleBone comes as an ultra-small, cost-effective solution with a powerful
hardware that runs Debian Linux. This book tries to explore the hardware and
software capabilities of BeagleBone to create real-life electronics and IoT
applications quickly.

Preface

Being an open source hardware board, BeagleBone is the perfect choice to study
embedded systems. Board design files and in-depth datasheets are open for being
studied. It comes with an Ethernet port that allows deploying the IoT projects
without making any addition to the board. It provides plenty of GPIO, ADC, UART,
I2C, and SPI pins that make it the right choice for electronic projects. One can install
Debian, Ubuntu, Android, and many other Liunx distributions. By default, it comes
with a full-fledged Debian Linux OS running on it. This gives you all the benefits
of Linux kernel such as multitasking, multiuser, and extensive device drivers
support. It also allows you to do programming in many languages, including C,
C++, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Perl, and so on. This book uses BeagleBone as a tool
to write useful applications on the embedded systems. Starting with the basics to set
up BeagleBone and Cloud9 IDE, this book covers interfacing with various electronic
components via simple programs. The electronics theory related to these components
is explained in detail before using them in a program. Then, the book covers some
real-life IoT applications.
This book is divided in two parts: the first part is covers programs in JavaScript and
the second part of this book provides electronics projects and IoT applications in
Python. Most of the physicial computing theories and concepts are covered in the
JavaScript part. Programs are explained in the explanation section, immediately after
it's source code. Troubleshooting steps are given wherever needed. Some programs
have an execution section, which explains how a program works internally.
Programming language conventions and error handling are loosely followed to make
programs short and easy to understand. The language that is to be covered first is a
tough choice. I choose JavaScript as it is energy-efficient, event-driven architecture.
It is more suited as an IoT solution. Only sending the important information reduces
the processing that is to be done on the Thing connected to the Internet. Javascript is
a natural language of web. It comes preinstalled in the BeagleBone along with Node
and Cloud9. You can start Javascript programming immediately after connecting
BeagleBone. Let's start the journey of programming the BeagleBone.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Cloud9 IDE, gives the essential information you need before you start
programming on BeagleBone. It gives hardware and software-related information
about the boards in the BeagleBone series. It provides you different ways to connect
to BeagleBone and start Cloud9 IDE to program.
Chapter 2, Blinking Onboard LEDs, covers how to use Cloud9 IDE to write the first
physical computing programblinking onboard LED on the BeagleBone. It covers
another program that creates a display pattern among the LEDs.

Preface

Chapter 3, Blinking External LEDs, explains the General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO)
theory and how to attach the external LEDs to the GPIO pins. Then, it covers blinking
LED and display pattern programs.
Chapter 4, Controlling LED Using a Push Button, teaches how to read from input
components using polling. The interrupt method programs for each of these
methods are covered.
Chapter 5, Reading from Analog Sensors, covers the theory about Analog I/O and how
BeagleBone supports it. Then, it has programs to read from the TMP36 temperature
sensor and light sensor.
Chapter 6, PWM Writing Analog Information, explains how the Pulse Width
Modulation (PWM) technique is used to write the analog information and how
BeagleBone supports it. It has a program to fade-in LED and control the servo
motor using PWM.
Chapter 7, Internet of Things with BeagleBone, explains how to implement IoT in
JavaScript using BeagleBone. It covers important information about IoT. Then,
there are three real-life examples. Two of them are programs to remotely control
LED and servo motor. Another program is to shoot an e-mail alert when
overtemperature is detected.
Chapter 8, Physical Computing in Python, explains rewriting all the programs that are
covered from Chapter 3 to Chapter 6 in the Python language.
Chapter 9, UART, I2C, SPI Programming, covers popular buses in the embedded
systemsUART, I2C, and SPI. All these protocols are explained here in detail. This
chapter covers programs that communicate over each of these buses.
Chapter 10, Internet of Things Using Python, teaches IoT programs in Python. It
has programs that were similar to the programs covered in Chapter 7. It has an
additional program that uploads the temperature data over the Cloud website and
we will receive the temperature graph over time for analysis.
Appendix A, GPIO Control in Bash, teaches how to set the direction and turn GPIO
on/off directly by writing sysfs files.
Appendix B, BeagleBone Capes, provides information about BeagleBone add-on boards
called capes.
Appendix C, Pinmux and the Device Tree, gives details about the new hardware
description files that help the kernel to initialize BeagleBone. They are called device
tree. It covers how to use the device tree filestoselecttheroleoftheBeagleBone
pin among other possibilities.
This book does not cover BeagleBone Programmable Realtime Units (PRUs) and
building/customising installable image.

Cloud9 IDE
BeagleBoard foundation has created a few low power ARM-based open hardware
boards. The most successful board among them was BeagleBone Black. Actually, it
is a series of boards that match physical size with the same processor and slightly
different hardware. There are three variants in this seriesBeagleBone White,
BeagleBone Black and BeagleBone Green. This book is about programming boards
in this BeagleBone series. We will see details about BeagleBone hardware as the first
topic of this chapter. Then we will learn how to connect and set up BeagleBone for
our work. All BeagleBones come with a programming interface called BoneScript.
It is a faster and easier way to deal with components of BeagleBone. We are going
to use BoneScript for programming in the first part of this book. At the end of this
chapter, we will learn about IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which
helps us to do programming in BoneScriptCloud9.
Here are the topics that will be covered in this chapter:

BeagleBone hardware

Installing the Debian image on SD card

Setting up BeagleBone

bone101 page

Cloud9

Hello World program

[1]

Cloud9 IDE

BeagleBone hardware
The BeagleBoard foundation is a non-profit corporation promoting open source
hardware and software. It has been releasing low power, hacker-friendly embedded
boards since 2008. They have created a few powerful and educational single board
computers. These boards are sold to the public under the Creative Commons
share-alike license that encourages sharing. These boards are collectively called
BeagleBoards. They have a GitHub page at https://github.com/beagleboard.
Here you can find hardware information files and software related to released
boards. Support for these boards comes from a very active developer community. The
BeagleBoard group on Google has more than 10,000 members. You can view posts
and join the group here: http://beagleboard.org/Community/Forums. Their IRC
(Internet Relay Chat) channel #beagle on freenode is active. You can join the channel
and ask questions at http://beagleboard.org/chat. There are more than 500
different projects registered with BeagleBoard at http://beagleboard.org/project.
There are two different series of released boards by beagleboard.org. First
is the BeagleBoard series. This series has candidatesoriginal BeagleBoard,
BeagleBoard-xM and BeagleBoard-X15. These are comparatively big, square-sized
boards. Their processors are slightly better in terms of performance and have an
additional DSP (Digital Signal Processor) that can do better audio/video processing.
These boards have many peripherals available onboard. They are more powerful and
comparatively costly. These boards are perfect in scenarios where major audio/video
processing is involved or performance is important.
Another series is called the BeagleBone series. This series has candidates
BeagleBone White, BeagleBone Black, BeagleBone Green. These boards are compact,
lightweight and share the same physical size (3.4 inch 2.1 inch). They all have the
same Texas Instruments AM335x sitara ARM Cortex-A8 processor. These boards
lack DSP and lag behind in scenarios with major audio/video processing. But these
processors are fine in other scenarios. They come with fewer peripherals on board.
You can attach many peripherals externally. They are far cheaper than boards in
the BeagleBoard series. They provide many expansion i/o pins of type GPIO/I2C/
SPI/PWM/UART/CAN/ADC. So you can connect lots of sensors, modules, electronic
components, displays, and so on. to these boards. All these boards share the same
expansion pins layout. This means if you study expansion of one board in the series,
the knowledge applies to other boards in the series too. There are small differences
in these boards. Please refer to the following table to learn the differences. All these
characteristics make BeagleBone a popular choice among hardware hackers. Besides
hardware, they can all boot up from the same firmware image. So all software
stack is the same for them. These boards can be programmed using the same
programming interface. All these boards come with preinstalled Cloud9 IDE, which
allows you to write and deploy applications on that board in many programming
languages remotely via web browser.
[2]

Chapter 1

This book covers programming all boards in the BeagleBone series:

BeagleBone White

BeagleBone Black

BeagleBone Green

Processor

720MHzARM
CortexA8

1GHz ARMCortex-A8

1GHz ARMCortex-A8

RAM

256MB DDR2

512MB DDR3

512MB DDR3

Storage

microSD slot only

2/4GB emmc,
microSD slot

4GB emmc, microSD slot

Display/
Audio

possible via external

cape or USB port

onboard micoHDMI

possible via external cape

or USB port

Power
connector

via MiniUSB or
5.5mm DC jack(5V)

via MiniUSB or 5.5mm

DC jack(5V)

Micro USB only

Boot
debugging

onboard serial and

JTAG via MiniUSB

via external USB-serial

to header pins

via external USB-serial to

header pins

Other
connector

one standard 2.0

USB host port, one
MiniUSB client port,
one Ethernet port

One standard 2.0

USBhost port, one
MiniUSB client port,
one Ethernet port

one UART and one I2C

grove connector, one
standard 2.0 USB host,
one Micro USB client port,
one Ethernet port

Expansion

2x 46pin i/o
expansion header

2x 46pin i/o expansion

header

2x 46pin i/o expansion

header

Comparison between different BeagleBones

BeagleBone White (BBW)

This is the first board released in the BeagleBone series. It was released at the end of
2011. At that time, it was just called BeagleBone. Now after more boards have been
released in this series, it is called Original BeagleBone or BeagleBone White (BBW).
BBW brought single cable development environment. One MiniUSB cable from
PC to BBW gives power to BBW, access to storage of BBW and network-over-USB
capabilities for communication. The same cable also gives serial access and JTAG
access for debugging via FTDI chip. For more information about BeagleBone White,
visit the following links:

http://beagleboard.org/bone
http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBone

[3]

Cloud9 IDE

The BeagleBone Black board is shown in the following image:

BeagleBone Black (BBB)

BeagleBone Black was released in April 2013. It arrived with more processor speed,
more RAM, onboard storage and Micro HDMI connectivity for a lesser price than
BBW. BeagleBone Black was very cost-effective and became a huge success. It ranked
second consecutively for 2014 and 2015 in a survey of the most popular single board
computers conducted by Linux gizmos. BeagleBone Black does not have JTAG access
via USB like BBW. You can get serial access via a USB port by help of USB-serial driver
in BeagleBone Black only after the board boots. It has a serial pins header. A special
USB-serial cable is needed to get serial access via this header to get boot time serial
access. Like BBW, single MiniUSB cable from the PC is sufficient to give power to BBB,
access to storage of BBB and network-over-USB capabilities for communication. For
more information about BeagleBone Black, visit the following links:

http://beagleboard.org/black
http://www.elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack

[4]

Chapter 1

BeagleBone Green (BBG)

Because BeagleBone is an open-source hardware design, anyone can modify design
and create a BeagleBone clone (similar to Arduino). BeagleBone Green is a modified
version of BeagleBone Black released in October 2015 by SeeedStudio. BeagleBone
Green is even cheaper than BeagleBone Black. They removed the Micro HDMI and
DC barrel jack. They replaced MiniUSB port with a more common Micro USB port.
Internally they are just the same. Two grove connectors are included, which makes
it easier to connect a large family of grove sensors and grove modules. For more
information about BeagleBone Green, visit the following links:

http://www.beagleboard.org/green

http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/Beaglebone_green
It is important to note that throughout this book we will use the
word BeagleBone to represent any board (BBW or BBB or BBG)
in the BeagleBone series. So BeagleBone setup steps in the book
should work for BeagleBone White as well as BeagleBone Black as
well as BeagleBone Green.

Installing Debian image on SD card

Now that we know about our hardware, let's install OS. BeagleBone Black and
BeagleBone Green come preinstalled with Debian Linux on emmc storage.
BeagleBone also supports booting from OS on an SD card. We can use a Linux setup
on emmc for exercises in this book. But it is always better to install OS on SD card
and boot from it. In case of wrong configuration or unexpected problems, we can
install Debian image and start hacking again. Also, it is easier to copy-paste files on
an SD card to and from a PC.
The BeagleBone wiki page has a list of OS known to be working on BeagleBone:
http://elinux.org/BeagleBone_Operating_Systems. It includes Android,
Ubuntu, Angstrom, Minix, WinCE, and so on. Officially Linux distribution Debian
is supported. All exercises in this book are tested on a wheezy 7.9 Debian image
provided by beagleboard.org. Still there should be no problem running these
exercises on other Debian versions. Debian is a popular Linux distribution in the
embedded world. It is one of the oldest and largest Linux distributions. There are
more than 100 Linux distributions derived from Debian. Debian's stable branch is
known to be one of the best-tested and most bug-free distribution. There are many
cases of machines that run for over a year without rebooting. This is important for
unattended embedded systems. Debian has thousands of installable packages. It uses
APT (Advanced Package Tool) using deb packages. You can get more information
about Debian on http://debian.org.
[5]

Cloud9 IDE

When you connect the BeagleBone to PC using a USB-to-MiniUSB cable (Micro USB
for BeagleBone Green), it gets detected as flash drive providing you with a local copy
of the documentation and drivers. When it autoruns, you see the browser opened
with the page Getting Started. If it does not run automatically, you can manually
open the file START.htm or the README.htm file inside the BeagleBone flash drive.
This HTML page has a link to "update to latest software" on the left. It provides you
with a step-by-step procedure with screenshots to install the latest prebuilt Debian
image on the SD card. An online version of this webpage is available at: http://
beagleboard.org/getting-started#update.
Here are the important steps to install the latest Debian image on the BeagleBone:
1. Latest supported images of all BeagleBoards are available at http://
beagleboard.org/latest-images. Download a Debian image for BeagleBone
on your PC. The same image works on BeagleBone White, Black and Green.
2. These images come compressed. On a Linux system you can extract it by
right-clicking to that file in File Manager and choosing Extract Here. On a
Windows system, you can extract it using decompression software 7zip
available at http://www.7-zip.org/download.html.You will get an .img
file. This is an actual image file.
3. Now, attach a USB SD card reader to your PC. On a Linux system, you can
dump an .img file on a SD card using the following command. You need to
find the name of the SD card file. You can get that in dmesg command output
after you connect the SD card. Put that in place of sdx in command.
sudo dd

if=<image_file_path> of=/dev/sdx bs=1M ; sync

On a Windows system, you can use image writer software like

win32diskimager, available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/
win32diskimager/files/latest/download. Select .img file and correct the
SD card drive and click the write button to dump an image on the SD card.
Warning: Be careful when selecting and formatting SD card
files/drives. The wrong selection for an SD card can damage
data on other storage.

4. Push this SD card in the BeagleBone SD card holder. Give power supply to
the board and you should see user LEDs blinking, which is sign of life. In
case you want to make sure you are booting from the SD card and not emmc,
get shell access (covered in the next topic) and edit files /etc/issue and /
etc/issue.net on the SD card to print that it is booted from the SD card.
The next the shell access login will show that message.
[6]

Chapter 1

Setting up BeagleBone
Embedded boards lack rich programming environment like x86 Desktop PC. Often
they are connected to x86 Desktop for programming. Before starting programming,
we need to connect BeagleBone to PC and set up the working environment. Let us
see different ways to connect to BeagleBone and how to start Cloud9 programming
IDE and the useful bone101 page. If you connect the BeagleBone via any one the
following ways successfully, you can skip others. You will need a little Linux
commands knowledge here. If any of these connection steps do not work, try the
steps given in Troubleshooting section. The most common problem is the power
supply. USB 2.0 is designed to supply max 500mA current, which is fine if you
are not attaching peripherals to BeagleBone. But if you are connecting Ethernet,
HDMI or USB devices, you should use a 5V 2A power adapter with 5.5mm DC
barrel jack to power up BeagleBone. You can get it at https://www.sparkfun.com/
products/12889. On BeagleBone Green, you will have to use a 5V 2A Micro USB
power adapter. You can get it at: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12890.
By default, you can login as username debian and password temppwd on default
Debian images for BeagleBone. This user has sudo access to all the commands in the
current Debian image. The board has to be secured before starting to use it. Once
logged in, you should change the password of debian user using the command
passwd. You can also login as root with no password when asked. You should login
as a root user and change the root password too using the same command.

Direct connection to monitor and keyboard

BeagleBone Black comes with a Micro HDMI port. You can connect it to HDMI
monitor/TV/display using Micro HDMI-HDMI cable. You can attach USB
keyboard and mouse to USB port directly or using USB hub. There is no need of
a host laptop/desktop PC for this connectivity. After GUI login, you can get shell
access by opening terminal emulator like lxterminal. You can browse local files on
BeagleBone. You can open the browser and visit http://beaglebone.local to see
the bone101 page and http://beaglebone.local:3000 to open Cloud9 IDE. There
are HDMI/DVI/VGA/LCD add-on cape boards that fit on the BeagleBone and help you
to achieve similar connectivity.

[7]

Cloud9 IDE

Ethernet over USB

For this connection, you need to connect the BeagleBone to the host laptop/desktop
PC using a USB to MiniUSB cable (Micro USB in case of BeagleBone Green). This is a
popular way of accessing BeagleBone and programming on Cloud9 IDE. BeagleBone
treats its MiniUSB port as a virtual Ethernet port using a special driver. With the help
of this driver, one can attach an IP address to MiniUSB port and access it like the
Ethernet. By default, it has the static address 192.168.7.2. In order to communicate
with it, you need to have usbnet/RNDIS driver installed on a connected PC. It comes
preinstalled in most of the Linux systems. In that case, you will get a new Ethernet
entry in output of command ifconfig. On a Windows system, you need to install
RNDIS drivers manually. BeagleBone has a RNDIS driver installable in its fat storage.
Please refer to the Installing Debian image on SD card section, to open the Getting
Started webpage. This page has a local link to an executable file that installs RNDIS
and other drivers. Click on the correct driver link on the Getting Started page
according to your PC OS. You can also install the driver manually from the Drivers
folder in BeagleBone's fat storage.
After installing the RNDIS2 driver, you will see the new network card interface in
network settings. It should get IP address 192.168.7.1 via dhcp. If not, manually
give the IP address to new network interface on your PC192.168.7.1. You can
open the bone101 page by putting http://192.168.7.2 in the browser address
bar and Cloud9 IDE with http://192.168.7.2:3000/.You can get shell access
on BeagleBone by running command ssh root@192.168.7.2 in the Linux/Mac
terminal. On Windows systems, you will need terminal emulator like putty for this.
You need to connect BeagleBone to the router via an Ethernet or USB-Wi-Fi in order
to get Internet access. You can use a VNC connection to get BeagleBone GUI access.
It is covered in a later section.

Troubleshooting

Use Firefox/Chrome only for connection. Internet Explorer is not supported.

Sometimes, BeagleBone's usb0 (Ethernet over USB) interface does not

get turned on automatically. It can be turned on by doing shell access to
BeagleBone and executing the command:
sudo ifconfig usb0 up.

Refer to the table at end of this topic to learn different ways you can get shell
access. After getting shell access to BeagleBone, you can use utilities like
ifconfig, ping and dmesg to debug further.

If you were not able to install the RNDIS driver from the BeagleBone flash
storage, you can install drivers from http://beagleboard.org/static/
Drivers.
[8]

Chapter 1

Ethernet port or USB Wi-Fi adapter

BeagleBone comes with an Ethernet port. You can connect a laptop/desktop PC
and BeagleBone via a Ethernet cable directly or preferably via a router. By default,
the Ethernet port of BeagleBone is configured to get automatic IP address via dhcp.
There should be a dhcp server configured in your network to get the IP address
assigned to the BeagleBone Ethernet port. Ethernet port connection with the
Internet-connected router gives your BeagleBone access to the Internet. Then you
can install/upgrade packages on the Internet. Many programs in this book rely on
Internet connection to the BeagleBone. This is the most preferred way of connection
as far as this book is concerned.
Another option is to connect the USB Wi-Fi adapter to BeagleBone and then connect
your PC to BeagleBone via its IP address. You need to install the correct kernel
firmware package according to your Wi-Fi adapter chipset using the command
apt-get. Once configured, this connection works the same as the Ethernet
connection.
If you connect it via Ethernet or a USB-Wi-Fi adapter, you can browse
http://<<Beaglebone's ip address>> for the bone101 page and
http://<<Beaglebone's ip address>>:3000 for Cloud9 IDE. BeagleBone
Ethernet gets its IP address via DHCP. You can find out the IP address of BeagleBone
from the router web login. You can also get shell access and run the command ifconfig
to find out the IP address of the BeagleBone. Different methods to get BeagleBone
shell access are given in the table at the end of this topic. So, if the BeagleBone IP
address is found to be 192.168.1.2, then the bone101 page will be accessible at
http://192.168.1.2. You can also ssh to root@<<Beaglebone's ip address>>
to get shell access via Ethernet. You can do VNC connection to get BeagleBone GUI
access, which is covered in the next section.

Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Ethernet/USB-Wi-Fi steps follows the same steps as

Ethernet over USB troubleshooting. But for the Ethernet port, the IP
addressing scheme will be different than 192.168.7.x.

In case of a problem with a USB-Wi-Fi adapter, make a serial or Ethernet

over USB connection to BeagleBone to get shell access and check whether it
is getting detected by the command dmesg. If it is detected correctly, you can
configure it using iwconfig and ifconfig.

[9]

Cloud9 IDE

VNC
You can also connect via VNC (Virtual Network Computing). It is a remote
desktop connection. You need to connect via the Ethernet over USB or Ethernet or
USB-Wi-Fi method first to do a VNC connection. Debian for BeagleBone comes with
tightvncserver preinstalled. To set up VNC get shell access to BeagleBone and run
the command vncserver on it as a Debian user. Download VNC client software
on PC and connect to server beaglebone:1. You will get a similar GUI like you get
on an HDMI connection. You will be able to get shell access via the lxterminal
terminal emulator, browse the bone101 page at http://beaglebone.local and
browse cloud9 IDE at http://beaglebone.local:3000. As BeagleBone White
and BeagleBone Green do not have an HDMI port, this option is useful if you want
GUI access.

Troubleshooting

The vncserver display does not always run on :1. Command vncserver
prints the name of the display it is running on. Note it down and use it when
connecting from the VNC viewer.

Sometimes the IP address works instead of the name. Specify<beaglebone

ip address>:1 as the server display.

The VNC session might not use the lxde window manager. Currently
Debian uses openbox window manager for the VNC session of the debian
user. It shows the desktop with no icon or panel. You get shell and browser
access by right-clicking on the desktop.

Serial Connection
Serial connection gives you a booting log and then a SSH-like command line
interface. Please note that you cannot access Cloud9 or bone101 page or GUI using
serial connection. BeagleBone provides two types of serial access. One is using a
pseudo USB-serial driver on a USB port. You get a SSH-like shell access by this
method. As a USB-serial driver starts working after kernel booting, you do not get
boot logs by this method. BeagleBone Black on MiniUSB port and BeagleBone Green
on Micro USB port provide this type of serial access. When you connect by these
methods, BeagleBone appears as serial device on the connected PC. On Windows,
it appears as serial COM port in the device manager. Note down the COM port
number in the device manager and connect to that port via putty or hyperterminal
specifying baud rate 115200.

[ 10 ]

Chapter 1

On the Linux system, check kernel messages of the PC using the command dmesg to
find out the name of the device it got detected as. It gets detected as /dev/ttyUSB0
by default. You can use this command to connect it serially:
sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

When you are done, press Ctrl + A then K to exit the screen.
Another type of serial connection possible on BeagleBone is via using a hardware
chip that is responsible for making a serial connection. As an external chip is doing
the work, this method gives boot time logs as well as shell access when booting
is done. This connection is the only way to get logs when BeagleBone is failing to
boot properly. It is useful to configure Ethernet, and debug problems. BeagleBone
White has FTDI USB-to-serial conversion chip onboard. It gives serial access over a
MiniUSB port. For BeagleBone Black and BeagleBone Green, the onboard USB-serial
chip is absent. But there are serial header pins available onboard. You need a special
USB-serial TTL cable to attach to these header pins. Any FTDI or PL2303 or cp210x
chip based USB TTL cable can be used here. The FTDI cable from Adafruit is popular
which can be found at https://www.adafruit.com/products/70. You will have
to install drivers corresponding to the chip used in the cable. Drivers for these chips
come preinstalled in most of the Linux systems and the serial port gets detected as
/dev/ttUSB0 by default. You can connect using the screen command we covered in
previous paragraph. Windows drivers for FTDI or PL2303 of CP210x are available on
vendor websites. Once you install the driver, you will be able to locate the COM port
in the device manager and connect via the hyperterminal or putty:
Physical ports

GUI

Shell

bone101

Cloud9

Internet

Direct monitor
and keyboard
connection

HDMI &
regular USB
port

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Possible via
Ethernet or
USB-Wi-Fi

Ethernet over
USB

Mini/Micro
USB

via
VNC

via
SSH

Yes

Yes

Possible via
Ethernet or
USB-Wi-Fi

Ethernet or USBWi-Fi

Ethernet or
regular USB
port

via
VNC

via
SSH

Yes

Yes

Yes if
connected to
router with
the Internet

VNC

Mini/Micro
USB or
Ethernet

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Possible via
Ethernet or
USB-Wi-Fi

Serial
connection

Mini/Micro
USB or serialheader

___

Yes

___

___

Possible via
Ethernet or
USB-Wi-Fi

[ 11 ]

Cloud9 IDE

Besides all these options, Cloud9 IDE has one tab inside it, which gives you a
root shell. So, if you have Cloud9 access, there is no need to connect via terminal
emulator or SSH to get BeagleBone shell access. Here is a helpful link on BeagleBone
wiki about connecting BeagleBone http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:Terminal_
Shells.

The bone101 page

We have seen several ways to connect to BeagleBone and access the bone101 webpage.
This web page can be accessed on web server running on port 80 on Beagelbone. This
page has information about the board and some examples of BoneScript code:

[ 12 ]

Chapter 1

The top-most green frame tells you that the board is connected. If your board is not
connected, this frame will be of orange color and it will ask you to enter the IP address
of the board. The left side pane has links to supported BoneScript and JavaScript
functions. The remaining page gives miscellaneous information including available
OS, upgrading OS, Cloud9 quickstart information, and expansion I/O pin details.
You can always get help about BoneScript library functions from the left frame on the
bone101 page. These function help information have example code snippets. These
code snippets come with a run and restore button. If your board is showing a green
frame indicating that you are connected, then you can run these examples directly
from the bone101 page. You can modify the code on the webpage and run new code
by pressing the run button. If you want to go back to the unmodified original example
code, press the restore button. You can even open this page from a smartphone
browser with the correct BeagleBone IP address and run code from there.
If you are connected to BeagleBone via Ethernet over USB, you get connected to the
topmost green frame automatically. If you are connected to the Ethernet port, you
will see an orange frame asking for the IP address. You can get the IP address of
the Ethernet port from your router weblogin or by getting shell access and running
ifconfig. You can enter that IP and you will get green frame saying You are
connected. Then you can explore online help and execute the example code.
A later part in the webpage gives a step-by-step procedure with screenshots to start
Cloud9 IDE and run the first BoneScript program. The last part of this page gives
details about BeagleBone Black hardware. It has links to the online hardware design
files and wiki page. This section gives pin details of expansion headers like which
pins have GPIO, analog input, PWM, UART, I2C and SPI capabilities. We will need this
information throughout the book. To get updated help information and examples
of BoneScript, visit http://beagleboard.org/Support/BoneScript/. This page
allows us to connect BeagleBone and run BoneScript example code on BeagleBone
similar to the bone101 page.

[ 13 ]

Cloud9 IDE

Cloud9 IDE
Cloud9 IDE runs on port number 3000 on BeagleBone. The Setting up BeagleBone
section covered many ways to connect to BeagleBone and open Cloud9 IDE. After
connecting to BeagleBone and opening Cloud9 via any one of these ways, we are
ready to explore BeagleBone's default programming IDE.
Cloud9 is a web-based IDE to develop primarily JavaScript and Node.js applications.
It also supports many other programming languages including PHP, Java, Python
and Ruby. Cloud9 runs on the web which means it works inside a browser. There
is no difference if you are using Windows, Linux or MAC OS on your PC or even
from your smartphone. If you are using a supported Firefox or Chrome browser on
a remote PC/smartphone, you can run Cloud9 and do programming on BeagleBone.
Cloud9 allows many developers to code simultaneously on single project through
the web. It supports instant deployment to many well-known cloud platforms like
Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine and OpenShift. It is open source software and
maintained by a company called Cloud9 IDE, Inc. You can get the source code here:
https://github.com/c9/core:

[ 14 ]

Chapter 1

Cloud9 is made up of multiple child windows inside. In the leftmost windows you
can select a project related window among Workspace or Navigate or Commands.
The Workspace window has a tree view that expands and collapses project files. You
can add new, rename and delete project files from this window. At the bottom, there
is a console window to display program output, compilation errors, and console.
log() messages. When you run any program, you get output printed in this window.
You can add a new JavaScript immediate tab in this window. It is useful to evaluate
expressions, execute statements and print variables values. You can also add a bash
shell in this window tab. You can run commands directly on BeagleBone from here.
At the right, there is a place for toolbars. Debugger and Outline toolbars take place
in this area. Expand the debugger toolbar when you want to debug a program line
by line. The middle empty part is the code editor area. Here actual code gets written.
It has very small pane area at the left side. It shows line numbers and breakpoints,
errors, and warning signs corresponding to that line. Cloud9 supports multiple tabs
to edit many files simultaneously. It provides code completion features for snippets
and identifiers. It has rich debugging features like setting breakpoints and step
into/step over. It provides dragging and dropping of files from computer to code
area. This way, you can add new ready-made code to your project. There are many
customization options available with a menu bar at the uppermost side.
We are going to use Cloud9 for all BoneScript programs. There are some
ready-made files with code in the demo directory. But they need some hardware
setup. So, we will skip them. The best way to get help is to visit the bone101 page
or http://beagleboard.org/Support/BoneScript/.

Hello World program

Let's do a quick and dirty Hello World JavaScript program. In this program, we are
just printing Hello World in the console view provided by Cloud9:
1. Go to the File menu. Click on the New File button. You will see a new code
editor tab opened with title Untitled1.
2. Write the following code in the code editor view:
// My first hello world program.
console.log("Hello World");

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files from your account at
http://www.packtpub.com for all the Packt Publishing books
you have purchased. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you
can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to
have the files e-mailed directly to you.
[ 15 ]

Cloud9 IDE

3. Go to the File menu again and save as hello.js. Now, you should see the
tab title is changed from Untitled1 to hello.js. Now Cloud9 knows this is
JavaScript program. It will highlight the program with different colors.
4. Click on the run button at the top of screen. You will see the Debugger
toolbar from right side is expanded to the Debug pane. Click on the Resume
button on expanded pane or press the F8 key. You should see the Hello
World text in the output view at the bottom.

Explanation
In this tiny code, the first line is the comment. JavaScript supports C and C++ style
commenting. So the pattern /* ... */ is used in multi-line commenting and
the pattern// is used for single line commenting. The second line is calling the
log() method on the object console. We have given the string Hello World as
a parameter to the log() method. A semicolon ; denotes a terminated statement.
Here, the console object provides access to the browser's debugging console.
console.log() is a method to print string. It prints Hello World in the console.
As we are using a built-in JavaScript object, we have not loaded a JavaScript
module/library. You can try more methods provided by the console object. You can
get a detailed document about JavaScript at: http://www.w3schools.com/js/ and
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript.

Summary
This chapter covered all the prerequisites to get programming IDE access on
BeagleBone with the latest software. In this chapter we learned about different
boards available in the BeagleBone series and their hardware differences. Then we
learned how to install the latest Debian image on BeagleBone and various ways to
connect to BeagleBone with troubleshooting steps. Once connected, we can visit
the bone101 HTML page, which has lots of information about BeagleBone. It also
provides help pages for JavaScript and BoneScript functions. Then we started using
Cloud9 IDE. It is a web-based IDE that runs on port number 3000 on BeagleBone. In
the end, we created our first JavaScript program that prints Hello World.
Now, we are ready with IDE and we know how to compile and run a program on
BeagleBone. In the next chapters, we will write programs that interact with the
physical environment.

[ 16 ]

Get more information Programming the BeagleBone

Where to buy this book

You can buy Programming the BeagleBone from the Packt Publishing website.
Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and most internet
book retailers.
Click here for ordering and shipping details.

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