Fun with BeagleBone Black

So, I've decided to try to play with ZigBee, and since I have a couple of BeagleBone Blacks hanging around doing nothing, I thought I'd try setting it up on them.

First thing I came across was that the BBB's seem to have issues with accessing their UARTS. Even via bonescript, there seem to be issues.

So, first thing I did was to upgrade to the latest firmware, and then do opkg update followed by opkg upgrade to get all the latest stuff. However, when I tried to run a bonescript program (the one from here), I got module bonescript not found!!!. WTF?

Since I had seen in the bonescript docs that the pinmode call doesn't really work until bonescript 0.2.3, I figured I'd be smart and just try to upgrade to the latest npm version of bonescript.

Long story short: bad idea. I had to go through all sorts of hell to make the npm install work (including editing the node-gyp configuration file to avoid a bug in the python version check), I finally got bonescript 0.2.3 working. So, I tried my test program and...the network connection died. Every time I ran the program, the same thing happened.

Turns out, this is an issue with the latest bonescript. So, I ended up having to back down to the previous version of bonescript via opkg. Once I investigated the module bonescript not found issue, it turned out that, for some reason, the bonescript module in /usr/lib/node_modules wasn't getting written, so I had to do a opkg remove bonescript followed by opkg install bonescript to make it all work.

All this, and I haven't even tried to get the XBee stuff working yet. Oy.