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BeagleBone Black Microcontroller

Boris, the BeagleBoard Logo MascotI recently bought a BeagleBone Black (BBB) and am having a great time with it.

From the website beaglebord.org:

BeagleBone Black is a $45 MSRP community-supported development platform for developers and hobbyists. Boot Linux in under 10 seconds and get started on development in less than 5 minutes with just a single USB cable.

What I Bought

I bought my BBB from Makershed as a part of a kit which included the book Getting Started with BeagleBone by Matt Richardson and a handful of electronic components. The kit is not bad, but I feel like it is overpriced, especially for someone who has a lot of components already.

I recommend the book as a good starting point, it does a great job of introducing the basics of the board and using Python and JavaScript to program it. There aren’t many other books out there, but I am not sure there needs to be.

I also bought a power supply, a very cool case, and a wi-fi dongle from Amazon.

The power supply is very basic one that provides the 2 amps necessary to power the BBB with a Wi-Fi dongle attached. Power Adapter DC 5V, 2A, 10W for BeagleBone Black at Amazon

I don’t have much to say about the Wi-Fi dongle yet as I haven’t tried to use it, I will write more about it when I do. It is small and was only $10 so I happy with it so far. Edimax EW-7811Un 150 Mbps Wireless 11n Nano Size USB Adapter with EZmax Setup Wizard

The case is pretty awesome. It is very well made and lets you see right into the board with risers for the buttons that make it much easier to press them. The BegaleBone Black should ship with a case like this. It looks like Laser Goodies has pulled their products from Amazon, or maybe they are just out of stock, here is the page on their website Beaglebone Black Slim Case – Clear

Laser Goodies Beaglebone Black Slim Case - Clear
Laser Goodies Beaglebone Black Slim Case – Clear

Why I Bought It

I regularly attend the wonderful Atlanta JavaScript Meetup group and a couple of weeks ago Tim Kadom of Thoughtworks showed us his Telepresence robot built with a BeagleBone black and an iPhone. All of the code was written on the BBB with the Cloud9 IDE in JavaScript. I was seriously intrigued.

I have been playing with Ardunio microcontrollers for awhile now and really like them. But they require that you program in their own C like language which I can muddle through but don’t really like. And it is not easy getting an Ardunio on a network, the code to make Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth to work doesn’t leave much space for your own ideas.

The Rasberry Pi on the other hand just doesn’t speak to me. I am more interested in them now that I have spent some time with a BeagleBoard, but I still don’t think I have much of a use for a Rasberry Pi right now.

With the BeagleBone it appears that I get all of the inputs and outputs of an Arduino while having all of the network abilities of a Rasberry Pi that I can program using JavaScript. That really gets me excited!

In the coming weeks I will be posting more about the BeagleBone Black and the project I am working towards.

2 Comments

  1. Tim kadom Tim kadom July 26, 2020

    Hi Dave,

    Just wasting a Sunday morning having fun with google and I saw this post. Thanks for the mention! The beagle rover became a larger roomba based robot, before it was disassembled for parts. It was a fun project though. Are you working on anything new lately?

    • davenelson davenelson September 1, 2020

      I am diving into Ham Radio right now, probably going to be building or buying a RigPi type device at some point.

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