Got me a BeagleBone Black today.

[nixnerd]

Just thought I’d share a photo:

And I wanted to let you fine folks know that while Adafruit and Element14 are out of these things, they’re somewhat available at Micro Center… if you’re fortunate enough to have one near you.

Big thanks to @traq for educating me on this awesome piece of hardware.

[__]

missed this; congrats.

I’m still playing with my BBB, but oooohhhhhhhh my, I found a new toy to fantasize about (specs). It’s a 2.3GHz quad core with a mini-itx “carrier” board (touchscreen, headers, and a load of connectors). Not a casual buy, but definitely a good value.

I have a “smart (firewall + wifi router + NAS) desk” idea rolling around in my head…

edit BTW, are you still thinking about making a bulk BBB order for your project?

[nixnerd]

Yeah dude, I heard about the Dragon Board about 2 weeks ago. I’ve ALWAYS been a fan of Qualcomm products. I LOVED all the Snapdragons on various Android phones I’ve owned. REALLY fast. That would be sick to play around with for sure.

On this project… I’ll be looking at a bulk buy once I get everything running. I’m in the beginning phases right now. I get my camera cape from Radiumboards next week. So… that will be fun.

I need to get a real feel for the platform and hardware hacking in general.

On another note, now that I run BSPWM instead of a desktop environment and I don’t use Adobe products at all anymore, my computing needs are VERY minimal.

I could see myself making a 4 node cluster out of Beagle Bone Blacks and using that as my primary computer.

I also really want to put Arch on a Wii. Just because that would be fun.

[__]

I need to get a real feel for the platform and hardware hacking in general.

I know what you mean. I’m not quite sure what I’ve gotten myself into, either, just yet.

[nixnerd]

I guess we’ll find out real soon! All I need to do is clear about 4 hours in my schedule, throw on the headphones and get to work!

[__]

Check it out, got a (sort of?) case for my BBB today. Protects, looks good, and all ports/ headers/ etc. are accessible.

[nixnerd]

Now that is awesome. I might get something like that for development just to keep it somewhat protected. When I deploy this thing in the middle of nowhere… nothing can be exposed. But that has a REALLY nice look!

I kind of want to make a BBB with an external my main computer. I guarantee it would have enough juice for coding.

Where did you get your 5v power supply?

[nixnerd]

Oh… and how big is your Micro SD? I was going to go 32 GB.

[__]

Yeah, it’s definitely a “dev” case.

Power: from adafruit. I also got a USB-to-barrel-jack cable.

SD card: only 16GB right now. I’ll have to buy a 32 gig eventually.

[nixnerd]

I’ll have to buy a 32 gig eventually.

I could see that. I decided to go with a 16 because I don’t need anything really on it. All I need is:

Arch Linux base/base-devel packages
Git
Vim
Python 2

I don’t need anything else. Not even a window manager. It’ll only be controlled via SSH so that would do me no good.

[__]

SSH is great and all, but I love me my serial debug cable. : )

[nixnerd]

I love me my serial debug cable.

If you find one that 100+ miles long at a good price, let me know.

[__]

I decided to go with a 16 because I don’t need anything really on it. All I need is:

Arch Linux base/base-devel packages
Git
Vim
Python 2

Do you have too much (more than 2GB) to fit on the eMMC? I’ve been booting from the SD for convenience during development, but I’m flashing it to the board when I’m done. Faster, plus I don’t have to worry about remembering to push the boot button.

The SD will be exclusively for storage. Of course, I have a 64GB flash drive I could pop in there, too.

[nixnerd]

I’m not totally sure because I haven’t installed Arch yet. The main reason is, I didn’t have a 5v power supply. The USB cable does not supply enough juice with an SD card in. At any rate, my supplies will arrive on Tuesday, at which point I can start doing some serious hacking. I’ll be removing everything that came on it though.

I think I’m going to partition the SD card like normal… then see how much space I’m taking up with all my packages. I would imagine that it’s going to be under 2GB. I don’t see what I could possibly put on it that would put it over that. In that case, I’ll put all my system partitions on the board and keep the SD for storage… same as you.

In the event that I’m just over 2GB, I’ll probably set up LVM to keep as much as possible on the board and the rest on the SD. Hell, I might use LVM anyway so I can repartition and change things easier.

Also, I don’t know what your SD class is but you can DRASTICALLY increase speed simply by getting a better rated SD. I got a sweet deal on a class 4 micro SD. Should be pretty fast but it would still be better to have my GRUB and boot partitions on the board. Does Arch Linux ARM even use GRUB? SysLinux maybe? Also, I think I’ll set up a 2GB swap so that will always have to be on the SD for obvious reasons… I don’t even know how that will work or if it will. Maybe no swap? It just makes me nervous with only 512 MB of RAM. I mean… I’ll be dealing with a lot of photos so I bet I’ll eat that up pretty quick. Maybe not.

One final note: Some cameras that I’ve looked at REQUIRE that you boot from the SD card in order for them to work… which sucks. I don’t know if they’re all like that but that will kind of mess up my plans.

Can you tell I have no clue what I’m doing?? :)

[nixnerd]

Quick aside on hardware hacking:

I decided I’m definitely getting Jeff Atwood’s CODE keyboard. It looks too awesome to pass up. The problem is that you can’t put custom colored keys from WASD on it because it’s a back-lit keyboard and WASD doesn’t sell custom keys with the letter pass-through. However… each key is lit up with it’s own LED…

Know what I’m thinking? Color code my shortcut keys myself with some awesome colored LEDs from Adafruit and a soldering gun! How awesome would that be?

*Edit: I probably won’t end up doing this because it would simply be for the cool factor. I hardly ever look at my keyboard for any reason… so that would be a waste of money. But an awesome hack nonetheless!

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