I always wanted myself to own an embedded device, so that I can play around with it, for fun!. So, I purchased Beagle Board XM, an ARM Cortex A8 based embedded device with 512 MB of DDR RAM. One need to buy few other accessories as well to work with Beagle Board. Below is my shopping list,
a). Beagle Board XM Rev A
b). HDMI DVI-D Male Cable – To connect Beagle Board to monitor.
c). 5V@2.5A Power Adapter – To power on the Beagle Board. Mini USB cable can also be used to power on the device.
d). USB to Serial RS232 cable – To connect to host machine.
e). USB Mini-B Device Cable.
Beagle Board XM comes with 4GB micro SD card, which is supposed to contain Angstrom validation image. Unfortunately, microSD card which I received was empty! Here is how I created validation image. BTW, I used Ubuntu Maverick to create this image.
a). wget http://beagleboard-validation.s3.amazonaws.com/deploy/201008201549/sd/beagleboard-validation-201008201549.img.gz
b). zcat beagleboard-validation-0201008201549.img.gz | dd of=/dev/your/sd/card bs=8225280
More details can be found here.
Next task was to power on the device. Its quite simple,
a). Connect USB to Serial RS232 to host computer. I use ‘gtkterm’ terminal program to connect to device via serial cable. Configure gtkterm for Baud Rate – 115200, DATA – 8 bit, PARITY- none, STOP – 1bit, FLOW CONTROL – none. Following is the output of ‘dmesg’ upon connecting the cable,
[ 1851.984446] usb 2-1.2: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
b). Connect the HDMI cable to monitor.
c). Power on the device using 5V power adapter.
Bingo! ‘gtkterm’ started showing the boot-up script logs. After validation image got loaded onto RAM, Beagle Board logo got displayed in my monitor, followed by linux kernel boot logs which ended in login shell. Just enter ‘root’ in the username field and that is all!
0xC0FFEE 