Getting Started with Beaglebone Green Wireless Development Board

SeeedStudio introduced BeagleBone Green Wireless based on BeagleBone Green, but replacing the Ethernet port by a Wilink8 WiFi and Bluetooth module, and providing 4 USB ports in total. I’ve also ready taken some picture of the board, and Grove Base Cape to addition the company’s add-on boards via I2C, UART, analog, or digital interfaces. So today, I’ll report about my experience getting started with the board.

First Boot of BeagleBone Green Wireless

Since the board comes with a Debian image installed on the internal 4GB eMMC flash, checking out the board should be really easy. The Wiki may help, but for a first try to check the board is indeed working, you can simply connect it to a 5V power supply, or the USB port of your computer to port it up.

I’m using a development machine running Ubuntu 14.04 with both Ethernet connected to my router, and a WiFi USB dongle which I used to find and connect to BeagleBoneXXXXXX access point. You’ll get assigned an IP address (e.g. 192.168.8.138), and can access the board using 192.168.8.1.

Alternatively, you could use the micro USB to USB cable to connect the board over IP. In Linux, it just works, but in Windows or Mac OS X, you may need to following the instructions to install the drivers.

You should see a new ethX device in your computer in 192.168.7.x subnet

Now you can start your favorite web browser, and access the board using http://192.168.8.1 (WiFi), or http://192.168.7.2 (USB Ethernet gadget) to get access to some documentation in the board, and links to tools like Node-RED,  Cloud9 IDE, and BoneScript.

Updating Firmware Image

Now that we’ve made sure we’ve received a working board, it might be a good idea to update the firmware. Bear in mind that the board will officially start shipping on May 30, 2016, and I got an early board, so the final image may differ.

I’ve open a terminal to download, extract, and flash the image to a 16GB micro SD card (4GB or greater required):

Replace sdX in the command line above, your own SD card device which you can check with lsblk.

This is an installer image designed to install Debian in the internal storage of the board. While the board is turned off, insert the micro SD card, hold the USER button (on board or Cape), connect the power supply, release the button, and the installation should start. The instructions mention that all 4 USRx LEDs will be lit solid when the update is complete and that it may take up to 45 minutes. So I went for dinner, and when I came back over one hour later, I did not see the LEDs were on, so I waited a little longer. But eventually, I decided to turn off the board, remove the micro SD card, and boot the board again.

After connecting to the BeagleBone SSID, I access the board with SSH successfully:

The date was 2016/05/16, so the update was successful.

BeagleBone Green Wireless Network Configuration

So far, everything went rather smoothly, but setting up networking was more of a challenge.

Since I now had two network interfaces on my computer with Ethernet to my router and WiFi to BeagleBone Green Wireless (BBGW), Internet traffic was routed to both, and since BBGW had no network connection I often had problems accessing the net to browse the web or send emails. So I had two options: change the routing table or connect the board to my router. I tried the routing table method first, which looked as follows initially:

After my attempt at changing metric to a high value did not work as expected, I changed the route from “link” to “host” for WiFi so that only the local traffic is routed there.

This did not work that well either, so I went with plan B to connect the board to my router. Network connections in BBGW:

So we wan t to configure wlan0 to connect to my router. Remember that only 2.4 GHz can work,  as the board does not support 5 GHz.

So I edited /etc/network/interfaces with vi, and added the following four line at the end of the file:

I save the done, and brought down and up the interface:

Awesome! Only problem is that after reboot, wlan0 would not acquire an IP address, and I had to run ifdown and ifup manually again.

I switched to static IP address configuration:

But the same problem occurred, so I asked on the beta group mailing list, and was informed that I could configure that using my smartphone. Simply connect BBGW AP, go to the sign-in page (http://192.168.8.1/login), click the select SSID, and enter password. That method is also mention in the system reference manual.

That’s supposed to be so easy, but sadly it did not work at all for me the first time as none of the ESSID were detected, but I tried the day after, and it eventually worked… I just don’t know why…

I could connect to 192.168.0.111 on my local network, even after a reboot. Good.

Node-RED in BeagleBone Green Wireless

Node-RED is a tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways, and it’s one of the tools available in BBGW web interface. The link is actually hardcoded to http:192.168.7.2:1880, which is a bug, but you can easily access the page using your own IP and 1880 port. I found one example for BeagleBone Black to turn on and off user LEDs, which I imported into Node-RED, and Deployed to the board.

Click on the square on the left of the “on” / “off” injector with turn on or off LED 2 or 3. You can change settings of one block by double-clicking  on it, and I’ve done so for bbb-discrete-out: USR2. You can see it will let you select whatever output pin supported by the board, change the name, invert values and so on.

The Blue gray “injectors” will either “0” or “1” string to the bbb-discrete-out nodes to change the GPIO status.

One interesting part of the BeagleBone Green boards are Grove connectors for add-on modules with the same name.

I’ve connected Grove LED strip (Digital I/O), Grove Button (Digital I/O), and a digital light sensor (I2C), but Node-RED does not list the LED strip , and only shows the analog Grove light sensor, so I was left with the Grove Button connected to GPIO 51 as marked on the silkscreen of the Grove connector on the cape. So I dragged and dropped Grove Button in Node-RED, and configured it to poll for GPIO_51 every 500 ms.

I planned to turn on and off some user LEDs, but connecting directly to bbb-discrete-out node for USR2 LED did not work. The problem is that I could not find documentation for this, except something about GrovePi, which explains that the Grove Button sends a JSON object containing a ‘state’ key:

So I probably would have to use another block to convert that JSON objects into “0” or “1” strings to controlled the LED/GPIOs. I’m not quite familiar enough with Node-RED, so I switched to testing Cloud9 IDE. [Update: There’s a tutorial using Node-RED, WioLink and BBGW, but it currently lacks in details]

Cloud9 IDE on BeagleBone Green Wireless

Cloud9 is a cloud based development environment that you can access using http://<IP_address>:3000.

The first neat thing I noticed is that you have access to the console as root from within the web browser, so SSH is not even needed with the board. I quickly checked the OS version (Debian GNU Linux 8) and kernel version (Linux 4.4.9-ti-r25) to test it out. We’ll also find several Python examples for BBG and Grove modules in the left panel.

I’ve open grove_i2x_digital_light_sensor.py demo program.

Access the terminal in the board to install the missing module

Another error:

So I’ve checked the I2C interfaces in the board:

There’s no i2c-1, so I changed the code to try with I2C-2 used with the Grove connector on BBGW:

And it went a little further:

I stopped there as it’s clear the sample have not been ported to the board, and to compound the issue Seeed Studio Wiki is currently down.

So I’ve had my share of issues with BeagleBone Green Wireless, but remember that the board is not shipping yet, so they still have time to improve the firmware and especially documentation. Yet I was expecting an easier experience considering the board leverages code and documentation from BeagleBone Black (software compatible), and there’s only about 10 days left before the retail boards ship.

If you are interested in the board, you can purchase BeagleBone Green Wireless for $44.50, the Grove Base Cape for $9.90, and various Grove modules on Seeed Studio website.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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