2020-01-25
It has been a while since the last update and a whole lot of progress has been made. On the software side everything seems to work. For realsies this time. The full software stack compiles and runs(!) on both Linux and FreeBSD. On Linux it compiles using GCC and Clang. On FreeBSD only Clang is used since that’s the default compiler. To be fair I’ve only tested the client side stuff on FreeBSD, but as Read more…
2019-08-26
The VPSB (Vic’s Serial and Power Board) is functional. Fucking finally! The last function to be tested was the current monitoring of the attached peripherals and I am glad to report that it works. Not flawlessly, unfortunately. I will have to replace the 0.010 ohm resistor current sense resistor with something a bit bigger on “production” boards. Going to try a 1.5 ohm in its place. With two 3 ohm resistors in parallel current sensing Read more…
2018-12-16
Looking back at the post history, and it appears that I am quite the Chatty Cathy this month. Lots of progress being made. First order of business: I screwed up the naming in a bunch of places. Instead of referring to the expansion board as VSPB (Vic’s Serial and Power Board) I referred to it as VPSB (Vic’s Power Serial Board). Well it’s easier to rename it than to change all of the references, so Read more…
2018-12-15
So on a BeagleBone Black running Linux, how can one tell if a device is enabled. Lets say we’re trying to get UART2 and UART4 to work. Those are both serial ports. How can one tell if the serial ports are enabled (or just a singular – serial port)? Well because we pretend to be familiar with Linux we do a ‘dmesg’ and look for a serial something of some sorts, yes? That sounds reasonable. Read more…
2018-12-13
The VSPB (Vic’s Serial and Power Board) has been delivered from Elecrow, populated, and reflowed in my reflow toaster. Other than mixing up TSSOP and SSOP footprints (that’s a whole different post) everything I have tested so far is functional. Gratuitous picture: I am super digging the white solder mask.
The new VSPB (Vic’s Serial and Power Board – catchy, eh?) is working very well so far. That will be a different post. This is about configuring the BBB (BeagleBone Black) the Vic way. During the development of this project, a new version of Debian was released for the BBB. Since I want to be hip and with the times I decided to upgrade to the latest version. Debian Stretch IoT is my poison of Read more…
2017-02-17
This update has been a while in the making. Between the last update and this one I accidental adopted a dog. That little shit machine has been a time sink. The Hardware Portion So anyways, the previous objective was to interface the NASA quality 4-20mA current loop simulator with the BBB. Several related and unrelated issues had to be address A bit tangential, but the GPIO pins are high when the BBB is first turned Read more…
2017-01-08
The Software So the next goal for this project was to get the BBB (Beagle Bone Black) to be able to drive digital output and to setup the reading of values from a 4-20mA current loop. Googling on configuring a GPIO pin to output with pull down resistors sent me down the rabbit hole of Device Tree overlays, kernel drivers, subsystems, SysFS, and so forth. Spent two days in the fuckery that is Linux documentation Read more…
2017-01-04
Got a chance to play with the Beagle Board. Installed the latest Debian Jessie IoT image[1]. Supposed to be an alternative distribution that removes all of the GUI stuff which sounds perfect for this project since all that this BBB is going to do is sit in a closet and pretend it’s a PLC. It’s certainly much more svelte than the default distribution with X11 and what not, but it’s still bloated in my opinion. Read more…