Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Beagle Board Validation - First Contact

Today the two ordered Beagle Board arrived from IDA Systems through courier(pretty fast service !!).








We(me and Abinesh) sat down to do the most basic Validation Test of the BeagleBoard.

The most basic minimum things required are :-
1. Beagle Board - Rev C3
2. USB OTG - USB cable ( for powering BeagleBoard)
3. DB9 Connector (for connecting to serial port of PC)
4. 10 pin FRC box connector (for connecting to RS232 pins on BeagleBoard)

Luckily I managed to get USB OTG cable from the Nexys-2 FPGA kit.


The above images are USB OTG cable, comparision of OTG and normal USB connector, 10 pin FRC Box connecctor, DB9 connector.

The first thing to test is to power up BeagleBoard, by connecting the OTG connector to the USB OTG connector just on top of 5V DC supply jack and connect the other end to USB Port of PC.


                      
 


As soon as power is On , PWR Led(D5) glows and after a delay of few seconds , three other Leds glows up(D6,D7,D12).
Press reset switch and see that Led D6,D7 turn Off and after releasing Reset Switch ,turns on after a delay of around 3-4 seconds.


After Power On test , turn off the power by disconnecting the USB from PC , now connect the 10 pin connector to BeagleBoard RS232 pins as shown above.

On the DB9 connector(female) solder pins no 2(Rx), 3(Tx) and 5(gnd). Now connect pin 2,3,5 to pin 2,3,5 on the 10 pin RS232 pins on BeagleBoard.  
An easy way to identify pins on RS232 connector is to look for pin marking 1, 2, 9, 10 on Beagle Board.

After making the connection between DB9 connector and 10 pin Box connector, connect the DB9 into Serial Port of PC.

Open Hyperterminal on Windows and set the following settings :-
BAUD RATE - 115200,
DATA - 8 bit,
PARITY- none,
STOP - 1bit,
FLOW CONTROL - none
start the session with the above settings.

Now turn on power and you should see the following appear on Hyperterminal Screen.



This is the most you can do without a SD Card. The main page which has details about Validation of BeagleBoard is here .



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2 comments:

  1. Actually, it is quite possible to boot a full Linux kernel via only the USB or serial port, but there aren't any great applications/how-tos on this currently. With the u-boot usbtty support, you can perform a transfer of the kernel very quickly and a RAM-based root file system.

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  2. @blog OMG !!! you are probably the first person to actually post a comment on this blog . Thanks.

    You are absolutely right about booting from USB or serial port , and in fact since Beagle Board has so many fetures like on board Flash ,it is quite possible to have several ways of booting it , but these features have not been fully or properly documented , so I am not actually comfotable with them.

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