BeagleBone is an inexpensive, very capable ARMv7 development kit from the same people who make the BeagleBoard.
The BeagleBone features:
- TI Sitara AM3359 720-MHz superscalar ARM Cortex-A8
- 2x 200MHz ARM7 programmable real-time coprocessors
- PowerVR SGX 530 GPU & LCD expansion header
- 256-MB DDR2 RAM
- 1x USB 2.0 host port
- 1x USB 2.0 device port
- On-chip 10/100 Ethernet, not off of USB
- MicroSD slot
- On-board USB-to-serial/JTAG over shared USB device port
- Add-on "capes" for expansion like Arduino shields
- 4x User Controllable LEDs
- Industry standard 3.3V I/Os on the expansion headers with easy-to-use 0.1" spacing
- Multiple I/O bus: GPMC (nand), MMC, SPI, I2C, CAN
- 6 serial ports (1 over usb, 5 more on headers)
- 66 GPIO pins
- 8 PWM outputs
- 7 A/D converters
- Board size: 3.4" x 2.1"
- Architecture
- ARMv7 Cortex-A8
- Processor
- TI AM3358 720Mhz
- RAM
- 256MB
- SD
- Micro SD
- USB
- 2
- Ethernet
- 10/100
SD Card Creation
Replace sdX in the following instructions with the device name for the SD card as it appears on your computer.
- Zero the beginning of the SD card:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=8
- Start fdisk to partition the SD card:
fdisk /dev/sdX
- At the fdisk prompt, delete old partitions and create a new one:
- Type o. This will clear out any partitions on the drive.
- Type p to list partitions. There should be no partitions left.
- Now type n, then p for primary, 1 for the first partition on the drive, 2048 for the first sector, and then press ENTER to accept the default last sector.
- Write the partition table and exit by typing w.
- Create the ext4 filesystem:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1
- Mount the filesystem:
mkdir mnt
mount /dev/sdX1 mnt
- Download and extract the root filesystem:
wget http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-am33x-latest.tar.gz
bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-am33x-latest.tar.gz -C mnt
sync
- Install the U-Boot bootloader:
dd if=mnt/boot/MLO of=/dev/sdX count=1 seek=1 conv=notrunc bs=128k
dd if=mnt/boot/u-boot.img of=/dev/sdX count=2 seek=1 conv=notrunc bs=384k
umount mnt
sync
- Insert the SD card into the BeagleBone, connect ethernet, and apply 5V power.
- Use the serial console or SSH to the IP address given to the board by your router.
- Login as the default user alarm with the password alarm.
- The default root password is root.
- Initialize the pacman keyring and populate the Arch Linux ARM package signing keys:
pacman-key --init
pacman-key --populate archlinuxarm