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.