Radarcape:BeagleboneBlack

The tasks described in this manual require advanced experience with Unix/Linux.

Scope

Beginning about end of 2014, the Radarcape will use a Beaglebone Black Rev. C in order to provide

• more computing power (1GHz instead of 720MHz)
• more memory: 512MB instead of 256MB
• an internal 4GB eMMC card instead of an external SD card

The only disadvantage seen is that the Radarcape looses the native serial console that was accessible through the back side USB.

This page documents changes required for a Radarcape on a Beaglebone Black Rev. C. Please note that the Radarcape requires at least Revision 3.0 cape board, as some pins that are now used by the eMMC, had to be re-routed.

For fallback reasons, an external SD card still can be used. See below.

Boot Requirements

In order to make /dev/ttyO5 available, the internal HDMI must be disabled already in kernel command line. For this purpose, on the first (FAT formatted) partition, a file uEnv.txt needs to be present which contains

 optargs=quiet capemgr.disable_partno=BB-BONELT-HDMI,BB-BONELT-HDMIN

Disabling HDMI was the compromise decided that the application SW is equal on BB-white and BB-black.

Finally, the first partition contains

 root@bbb-setup1:~/mmc1# ls -l
 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         99976 Jul  5  2014 MLO
 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        379412 Jul  5  2014 u-boot.img
 -rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root            68 Jan  1 00:00 uEnv.txt