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BeagleBone Black available - if you're quick.

Posted by Gary McCray on March 5, 2014 at 10:00am

Hi all, Beagle Bone Blacks are available at Adafruit this morning.

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I wouldn't ordinarily put an Advertisement for a product as a Blog but as you may or may not know, Beagle Bone Blacks are seriously hard to come by.

Everybody is out of stock all the time, except a fewy unscrupulous dealers who jack up the price - a lot.

Adafruit has a notify service and today they got both Beagle Bone Blacks and the BBB Starter kit (which is a really super deal).

I already had a BBB from them but also wanted a starter kit so signed up for notify again.

http://www.adafruit.com/products/1278

http://www.adafruit.com/products/703

My Starter kit is now on order (didn't think I'd tell you about it till I ensured mine did you?)

In any case if you want a BBB, now's the time - if you are really quick.

Best Regards,

Gary

Tags: beagle, black, bone
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Comments

  • Gary McCray March 29, 2014 at 9:09pm

    Hi all,

    Swift, yes I have BBB and even Adafruit BBB starter kit.

    Very happy with the way Adafruit has handled this.

    I have brought up BBB and flashed standard Linux and have operational but not much more done yet.

    Also bringing up Odroid U3 at the same time.

    Linux is new to me so still a bit of a learning curve, very much like it so far though.

    I am not directly involved in the development of either the BBB - APM firmware or the Pixhawk Fire cape, although I do know prototypes exist and are being debugged. at this time.

    At this time, I don't think the developers are quite ready to launch an end user wiki page although I expect it won't be long and I will contribute in whatever way they find useful and I am sure your contributions would be appreciated as well.

    I think it is very safe to assume that the next major development after (or perhaps along side of) the Pixhawk is the Beagle Bone Black based Pixhawk Fire.

    And the way current code development is going I would expect it to be able to make use of alternatye IMUs and to provide for easier interfacing to other microcomputer based devices as well.

    The opportunity a full Linux computer gives us to develop powerful applications with real development tools.

    And the current emphasis the developers have placed on rewriting the base level code in a more logical and easier to understand way (the onion) and using more rational and capable structures (EKF) should mean that a lot more people are going to be able to "develop" effectively and more easily than was possible before.

    At this time, the Odroid U3, a similarly supported but considerably more powerful Quad core microcontroller also seems like it might be next in line after the BBB, but even if it isn't, it's potential as a coprocessor for such things as 3D, vision and SLAM, make it a compelling device to consider including.

    I'm pretty sure its actually a lot faster and more powerful than the computer I am typing this on.

    Really happy to see so many of you actually have the early APM code up and running for it, should be interesting times.

    Best Regards,

    Gary

  • Anthony Kent March 29, 2014 at 4:50pm

    Order mine yesterday and should be here by Wednesday. They still have plenty more. 

  • Alex Wright March 23, 2014 at 5:58am
    I installed arch Linux on my beaglebone. I built a realtime kernel and installed it. I then built as the instructions said. The board is Linux so you run make Linux like the instructions say. I have the gy-80 IMU which is detected when I run arduplane. I just need a firecape and Pru control of servos to be ready
  • hotelzululima March 23, 2014 at 5:51am

    Fire Cape boards? populated or unpopulated? sources?

          HZL

  • hotelzululima March 23, 2014 at 5:49am

    I just cant seem to divine the significance of BOARD = mega2560 and how to alter appropriately for BBB(and I just realized I cloned the px4 libs when I ran the ubuntu prereqs need to clone and change for BBB native or make same script arch aware and act appropriately.

    I didnt find it necessary to install the arduino environment at all.. oh boy autopilot debug in gdb!!(BENCH ONLY)

    tcov and some decent editing, development and debug tools and the ability to do mission processing etc.

      

           HZL

  • hotelzululima March 23, 2014 at 5:32am

    hi everyone..

        got my  BBB in and flashed it to wheezy  and plugged a 32mb Sandsk in and currently completing http://dev.ardupilot.com/wiki/building-for-beaglebone-black-on-linux/  for building the RT kernel.

    I did see the following in my travails although cant remember where(maybe it was the source!)
    mk/environ.mk:HAL_BOARD = HAL_BOARD_PX4
    mk/environ.mk:HAL_BOARD = HAL_BOARD_AVR_SITL
    mk/environ.mk:HAL_BOARD = HAL_BOARD_LINUX
    mk/environ.mk:HAL_BOARD = HAL_BOARD_VRBRAIN
    mk/environ.mk:HAL_BOARD = HAL_BOARD_APM1
    mk/environ.mk:HAL_BOARD = HAL_BOARD_APM2
    mk/environ.mk:HAL_BOARD = HAL_BOARD_FLYMAPLE

    The above targets do seem to work when I cross or directly compile them

               HZL

  • Lafras Henning March 22, 2014 at 1:54am

    For an alternate supply of OEM boards based on the BeagleBone Black,

    check out the site www.bbbc1.com

  • Alex Wright March 13, 2014 at 1:39pm

    I am also in the same position minus the build errors. I have arduplane compiled and running on my beaglebone black running archlinux and a real time kernel compiled and booting great as well. I am not sure if the firecap is absolutely necessary for the beaglebone black to be used. What I am unsure of is the current state of the port. Is ardupilot able to use the pru's for pwm now? I have been able to get the beaglebone blac and ardupilot to both recognize my gy-80 10dof imu unit as well. I have been just ready to throw this thing in my plane once its ready to fly with it.

  • Gary McCray March 12, 2014 at 12:39pm

    Fantastic Eric,

    Looks like all you need now is the Fire cape and your good to go.

    I don't think the first warning issue is significant.

    Looks like in this case it is just telling you have actually written a new make file, doesn't seem like you need a warning for that, but I guess its just letting you know you might have accidentally overwritten your old make file.

    And the only stuff you might need to modify in the make file are the assorted paths to the various source files.

    And as for the type casts, and a whole lot of other assorted warnings you see a lot of the makes for the PX's and APMs too, I am sure a lot of very tedious tidying could fix that, but nobody seems very motivated to do so.

    Basically it looks like you have built the current BBB APM (autopilot multiplatform) firmware.

    Great start your ahead of me, 

    Gary

  • Gary McCray March 11, 2014 at 3:17pm

    Hi HZL,

    I don't think the Radioshack starter kit is the same as the one from AdaFruit.

    It's hard to tell from the Radioshack on line description since they don't really go into the contents of it thoroughly on line.

    I do know a lot of retailers have been marking up the price because the margin on the $45.00 is so low and one way they do that is by packing in a few dollars worth of parts and call it a starter kit.

    The AdaFruit starter kit really is.

    But with the AdaFruit package it was very clear that you got a lot of really worthwhile stuff that seemed to fully justify the $79.00 price tag.

    My AdaFruit BBB starter kit should be in Friday

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