Beaglebone Black

I kept reading good things about the Beaglebone Black and wanted to try things out for myself so I ordered one. I recently got it in the mail and it has a pretty cool look to it (though I do like the original beaglebone look better). However, this one is much more powerful and comes at a lower price. Here is a closer look.

Figure 1 - Powered on with stock image

I then wanted to upgrade to the latest image. This platform uses a different flavor of linux called Angstrom. Different commands to do similar things as I'm more familiar with RedHat (rpm based) and Ubuntu (debian based). Nothing too far fetched, so I'm sure the learning curve won't be too steep. Anyway, on to the upgrade.

As there are many blogs about how to do it, I'll just detail out what I did to get mine updated.

1. Download the latest image from here: http://beagleboard.org/latest-images

2. Uncompress the image file. I used 7zip

3. I then got my micro SD card (8GB) and plugged it into my adapter then to the computer.

4. I still had used Win32 Disk Imager since I had it installed from using different images with my Raspberry Pi. You can download it here: here

5. I then powered down the BBB and inserted the micro SD card that has the latest image that Win32 Disk Imager just wrote to it.

6. Hold down the S2 button (located on the opposite side of the RJ-45 jack. Here is an image

Figure 2 - S2 button location

7. Plug in the 5V adapter into the wall. After a few seconds the LED's begin to blink and you can let the S2 button go.

8. To flash the image, it took about 30 minutes. When it is complete, all 4 LEDs will be lit and look something like this:

Figure 3 - Flash complete

9. Disconnect power and remove the micro SD card.

10. Boot up to the new image.